The personality of Christ

I

GIFT OF
Professor B'.H. Lehman

i

THE
PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

THE PERSONALITY
OF CHRIST

BY

DOM ANSCAR VONIER, O.SJB.
\\

ABBOT OF BUCKFAST

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW. LONDON

FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA. AND MADRAS

1916

All righ'ts reserved

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Cum librum cui titulus ' The Personality of Christ '
a Rmo P. Anschario Vonier, Abbate Congregationis
Nostrae, anglico sermone exaratum, Rmus P. Abbas
Thomas Bergh, Censor a Nobis deputatus, recognoverit
et in lucem edi posse probaverit, facultatem facimus
ut typis mandetur, si iis ad quos pertinet ita videbitur.
Datum Sublaci in Protocoenobio S. Scholasticae, V.,
die 26 Junii 1914.

D. Maurus M. Serafini, O.S.B.,

Abb. Gen.
D. Isidorus M. Sain, O.S.B.,
a Secretis.

Nihil Obstat.

Francis. M. Canon Wyndham,
Censor Deputatus.

Imprimatur.

Edm. Canon Surmont,
Vic. Gen.

Westmonasterii,

die 26 Augusti, 1914.

FOREWORD

The four Gospels are the books most written about
and most commented on in our own days. No
age has produced anything superior, in finished
scholarship, to the Gospel literature of our times.
Even those exegetes from whom the fulness of
the Christian faith is not to be expected are
mostly reverent and often exhibit learning of the
highest quality. Indeed, the modern system of
' Meditation/ on the other hand, as an integral
part of spiritual and ascetical life, has produced an
endless variety of books in which Christ's Life is
set forth in a way that ought to be most efficacious
in making us understand the Gospels, as they are
ransacked by the writers of ' Meditations ' in
order to compel us to more intimate love for,
and more close imitation of, Christ. Some of
those productions are really superior studies of
the wonderful character of Christ, and they give
us what mere exegetical learning could never give —
an insight into Christ's intimate Life. The present
work is neither exegetical, nor apologetical, nor

787426

vi FOREWORD

devotional, but strictly theological. Catholic
Christology has received less attention from the
public, though our own days have seen the
production of some first-rate treatises de Verbo
Incamato by professional theologians. Yet we
cannot entirely neglect the theological view of
Christ without grave dangers to both our exegetical
and devotional efforts. In my own humble way I
am trying to help in filling up the great gap with
the present modest book.

The English Fathers of the Dominican Order
are bringing out an English translation of the
third part of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas,
which is his treatise on the Incarnation. That
there should be a demand for such a work, in the
Anglo-Saxon world, is a thing to rejoice the Angels ;
there are evidently men amongst us eager to
penetrate the subtleties and sound the depths of
the masterpieces of religious thought.

My book is a very unconventional rendering
of the most important points of the third part of
the Summa ; but I trust that I have at least
succeeded in giving the spirit of the great medieval
saint and thinker, and if the following pages
produce a desire in the reader to go to the Summa
itself, I shall consider that I have had a notable
success.

ANSCAR VONIER, O.S.B.
Buckfast Abbey.

May i, 1914.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. Thb Metaphysics of the Incarnation .

II. The Christ of the Gospels, of Chris-
tian Theology, and of Christian
Experience .....

III. Christ and the Science of Comparative

Religion . .

IV. Christ the Wonderful .

V. An Attempt at defining Personality

VI. The Replacement of Human Personality
by Divine Personality .

VII. The Continuance of the Human Nature
in Christ ....

VIII. ' Amen, Amen, I say to you, Before
Abraham was made, I am '

IX. How completely Christ's Human Nature
is Divine .....

X. The Word was made Flesh .

XI. A Scholastic Hypothesis

XII. ' INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM DlVINITATIS

XIII. The Aim of Hypostatic Union

XIV. The Two Wills and the Two Operations

in Christ .....

XV. Christ's Knowledge.

XVI. In Christ

XVII. Christ All in All ....

«4

20
29

39
45

48

53
60
64
69
85

90

95
108
112

Vlll

CONTENTS

CHAPTER rkOM

XVIII. Christ's Reserves . . . .122

XIX. The Hiding of Christ's Godhead . .128

XX. The Form of the Slave . . .132

XXI. The Transition . . . . .142

XXII. Christ's Sincerity 152

XXIII. The Great Life 161

XXIV. God Meeting God 176

XXV. The Man of Sorrows . . . .181

XXVI. The Happiness of Christ . . .185

XXVII. Christ the Strong One . . . 190

XXVIII. The Misunderstandings of the Gospel . 196

XXIX. The Christ Tragedy . . . .202

XXX. The Character of Christ . . .210

XXXI. Christ's Place in the World . . 221

XXXII. Christ and the World's Progress . 230

XXXIII. The Power of Christ .... 235

XXXIV. The Finding of Christ . . .238

XXXV. Christ the Father of the World to come 242

XXXVI. The Link between Christ's Mortal Life

and the Eucharist . 247

XXXVII. The Majesty of the Eucharistic Presence 251

XXXVIII. The Blood of Christ .... 255

XXXIX. The Optimism of the Incarnation . .260

XL. Christ the Hero. . . . .268

Conclusion 271

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

CHAPTER I

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE INCARNATION

There is from the very beginning of our Lord's
earthly life the substitution of the personal element
for the purely legal element. He is a mysterious
personality, and the whole success of His religion
lies in His being trusted, in His being followed,
in His being understood ; the main precept of
His religion is a personal precept of love for one
another. In other words, instead of material legal
observances He established the great observances
of the human heart, of mutual understanding, of
mutual support, of mutual love. ' Bear ye one
another's burdens, and so you shall fulfil the
law of Christ.' 1

It is the triumph of His grace to keep human
beings in the oneness of religious faith without
imposing upon them any strict obligation of

1 Gal. vi, 2,

•*. .toe; personality of christ

uniformity in external ascetical practice. He Him-
self, in His own Person, is the unifying force of
Christianity. His first disciples followed Him in
the simplicity of their new friendship, carried away
by His ineffable charm. No doubt they gloried
in being the followers of so great a rabbi, and yet
they had no external observance to make them into
a school. How could they be the followers of a
teacher without fasting, whilst the disciples of John
and the disciples of the Pharisees fast so frequently ?
In other words, how could any man be a disciple of
another man unless he carried in himself the badge
of that man's mastery in the way of a fast, or an
ablution, or a prayer ?

Men hold their fellow men together with the
chains of some external austerity ; no man can be
another man's master in truth and reality without
putting upon the neck of the disciple the iron
yoke of bodily observance ; yet it was to be the
achievement of the new rabbi to have a school
whose only observance it was to believe and to
have confidence in Him, and to have friendship
and love one with another. ' By this shall
men know that you are my disciples, if you have
love one for another.' 1 ' Can the children of the
marriage fast as long as the bridegroom is with
them ? . . . But the days will come, when the
bridegroom is taken away from them, and then

1 St. John xiii. 35.

METAPHYSICS OF THE INCARNATION 3

they shall fast in those days.' * Fasting has its
part in the formation of a Christian. But you
are not Christ's disciple simply because you fast
four times in the week, whilst John's disciples
fast thrice, and the Pharisees twice. ' By this
shall men know that you are my disciples, if you
have love one for another.'

The early attraction to Christ and fidelity to
Him have all the joyous liberty of a nuptial feast ;
attachment and fellowship are all the surer because
the feast is bright and gay ; serious work is to be
done after the feast, but the memory of the feast
remains the undying tie of attachment.

The peace and the prosperity of the Christian
cause are all in that. All conversion, all sanctity,
must be associated with Christ's Person and the
human persons with whom our lot is cast. Sanctity
may indeed have certain secondary variations.
With some souls Christ's Person is the predomin-
ating element ; with other souls, thoughts — active
thoughts — are concerned more directly with the
visible human persons ; but persons it is, and
Christian religion is in danger where legal ob-
servance of some sort begins to crowd out the
personal element, when all spiritual efforts are
directed towards the scrupulous carrying out of
a system of observances for their own sake without
a personal purpose.

1 St. Mark ii. 19, 20.

b 2

4 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

The spirit of Christianity, despite its ascetic
purity, is diametrically opposed to such a material
conception of the ethical life, and the temporary
successes it may obtain are but the harbingers
of final catastrophe. It is our Lord's exclusive
privilege to be Law, or better still to be a substitu-
tion for all law. The human mind is jealous of
such a position because the human mind resents
being bound to a person ; but as our Lord's Person
is a Divine Person, as it is the second Person of the
Trinity, the jealousy of the human mind is not
warranted in the case of Christ.

The Pharisees took umbrage at our Lord's
Person much more than at His doctrine. Abstract
laws or external observances never arouse hatred
and jealousy, just as they do not arouse love and
sympathy in the measure in which a person arouses
those feelings.

The great theological doctrines therefore con-
cerning our Lord's Person have an intimate connec-
tion with our Lord's spiritual position in the world,
because our Lord is nothing if not a Personality.
His Grace is nothing if not a grace of love and of
mutual understanding. There is no profit from
the Gospel unless it be the perfecting of the human
mind and the human heart. A man may invent an
ascetical system and find other men to submit to it,
but no man can make of his own person the irre-
vocable voice of conscience, the all-satisfying food of

METAPHYSICS OF THE INCARNATION 5

heart and mind. Our Lord is the only Person who
ever could.

No man can make of the relations of other men
with their fellow men the badge of true disciple-
ship ; our Lord is the only exception, and no one
questions His authority and right to do it. The
teachings therefore of Christian theology about our
Lord's Person ought to be of intense interest to
every follower of Christ, and His being a Divine
Person should fill us with unbounded joy.

The history of Christian sanctity shows in
innumerable souls an intense personal love for
Christ : such is the historical fact. The question
may be asked whether such deep personal friendship
with one that is not of this world would be at all
possible if He were not a living Divine Personality.
In other words, Is not the Personal Love of Christ
such as history reveals it, a psychological proof of
His Divine Reality ?

One thing is certain : it does not exist elsewhere
— the personalities of the non-Christian religions are
not the elements of the human conscience such as
Christ is.

It would be a great mistake, therefore, to think
that what we might call the metaphysical truths of
the Hypostatical Union are barren and unpractical
verities ; they are, on the contrary, indispensable to
any rational explanation of our Lord's position with
the human race. There is in Christ a kind of

6 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

multiplicity of spiritual presence that makes Him
the personal spiritual friend of millions of souls ; He
has a kind of universality of presence and action,
which interferes in no way with the intense in-
dividuality of His relations with particular souls.
Such is the Christ of experience and history. In
His humanity He has for all practical purposes the
illimitability of Divinity itself ; He is truly the
Universal Friend, and yet no one ever was such
an exclusively personal friend to individual members
of the human race.

Now, such intense individuality with such
comprehensive universality has but one explana-
tion : Hypostatic Union, or Divine Personality,
the mystery of one human nature existing through
God's personal existence. In our own days more
than ever, philosophical minds dread the rule of
a mere individual, however holy that individual
may be. It does not seem as if an individual
being could ever be such as to give satisfaction
to the mind of a race. So we find constantly in
modern theologies the substitution of the ideal
for the individual. Such efforts at substitution
are anything but blameworthy ; it is certain that
no merely human individual could ever furnish
a complete ideal for mankind, could ever be a life-
giving, practical ideal for the human race. But, on
the other hand, modern theologies are quite wrong
in applying that process of substitution to Christ ;

METAPHYSICS OF THE INCARNATION 7

there is no need of substituting an ideal Christ
for the historic Christ, precisely because the Christ
of the Gospels, the Christ of Catholic theology,
possesses in truth and reality an infinitude of
Personality. There is no limitation in Him. With-
out that infinitude of Personality, as far as the
race is concerned, an ideal Christ would be indeed
preferable to a concrete personal Christ.

This is why I say that the great metaphysical
principles underlying Hypostatic Union are of
immense practical import. I do not mean that
individual souls do make those great truths a
practical study ; they simply possess Christ, and are
happy in the possession. But for the philosophical
mind that begins to consider Christ's position
with mankind, the metaphysics of the Incarnation
are indispensable.

CHAPTER II

THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS, OF CHRISTIAN
THEOLOGY, AND OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE

It may be said of our Lord that His written life
is far from being proportionate to His place in
the world of souls. To a very great extent love
for Christ is independent of the Gospels taken
as mere narratives. In most cases, love for Christ
exists in the human soul long before the books
of the New Testament have been taken up as a
spiritual study. Children of tender years will
kiss a crucifix with the reverence of deepest love,
because it is the image of Christ ; and it would
be an entire disregard of facts to say that the
boy of six loves Christ so deeply because he has
been made to understand the sublime charity of
His Crucifixion from the gospel narrative. Long
before the child is capable of understanding the
great moral beauty of Christ's passion, he loves
Christ crucified as sincerely as he loves his parents.
A deeper comprehension of the love-drama of
Christ's death is almost exclusively the achievement

THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 9

of more mature sanctity. Nor is this the peculiar
characteristic of childhood's love for our Lord ; the
observation holds good much more generally. What
there is of living faith in Christ in this world is out
of all proportion to what there is written of Him,
and, still more, to what practical perusal there is
even of the written documents. For millions of men
and women Christ is a great living Personality,
dominating their innermost thoughts ; yet with
nearly all of them it is perfectly true to say that
it is not the habitual perusal of the Gospels that
has given to Him such a place in their soul. Their
knowledge of the Gospel is not a very intimate one ;
they are satisfied with its general facts, whilst
Christ Himself is a very clear, very distinct power
in their life. If the study of our Lord's written
life is made a special spiritual practice by a Christian,
it is because the Gospel speaks to him of One whom
he loves and knows already, just as the lover takes
the keenest interest in being told of the doings
and movements of the person loved.

It seems paradoxical, yet it is the experience
of all observers of spiritual things : no one profits
by the Gospels unless he be first in love with Christ.
But this psychological fact may be stated in a yet
more comprehensive form : The sacred Gospels
are no adequate explanation of the place Christ
holds in the hearts of men. They may account for
the spiritual portrait of Christ which Christian men

io THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

and women hold enshrined in their minds, but
they do not account for the power with which Christ
sways the hearts of millions. From time to time
there are great Gospel enthusiasms passing over
the Christian world. The sacred text is distributed
broadcast in cheap editions ; sayings of Christ are
seen everywhere ; even the very modern billposter
is pressed into service to render Christ's sayings
accessible to the man that runs. These manifesta-
tions of zeal, however laudable, are generally short-
lived precisely because they never succeed in
stirring any deeper feeling.

Great nations in Europe live in the faith and
love of Christ, and it may safely be asserted that
any textual knowledge of our Lord's sayings is
conspicuous by its absence in the vast majority
of the good Christians of those nations. Christ
for them is not a text, but a living Person, whose
presence and whose look is infinitely more drastic
in its spiritual effect than any saying of His recorded
in the Gospels ; and if the Gospel text is at times
like the sword of fire to the soul, it is because it is
connected with the living Presence, because it is
read in the living love of Christ.

On the other hand, it is true again to say that
the Christ of the human soul is not greater than
the Christ of the Gospels. It is easy enough, for
instance, to see what Christ was to the soul of St.
Teresa, to the soul of St. Catherine. Those great

THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS n

mystics have left very clear records of their faith in
and their love for Christ. Yet the ' Divine Master '
of St. Teresa's writings is not greater than the
' Master ' of the Gospels. St. Teresa did not create
in her intense religious consciousness a Christ not
warranted by the sober Gospel narrative. She
may speak of the Spouse of her soul with greater
enthusiasm than the Evangelist ; but she never says
a greater thing than was said by the Evangelist.

With Christ, the soberness of the narration
belongs to the official historian who has lived with
Him or His disciples. The enthusiasm is found in
the ordinary worshipper to whom the work of the
historian is more a canticle of love than a source
of love. But the enthusiasm of the worshipper
never assumes anything about Christ's merits
which cannot be stated in the exact language of
the Evangelist.

It has been said with great truth of certain
religions that they are like inverted pyramids
standing on their apex. The basis is the thinnest
part, and the monument broadens as it leaves the
almost in visile starting-point. The religious con-
sciousness of the race has evolved a vast religious
personality from a being of much smaller compass.
Now, such a comparison would be quite unfair with
the position of Christ in the world. The Christ of our
Eucharistic Congresses is not greater than the Christ
of St. John's Gospel. With Him there is no gradual

12 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

broadening of a religious ideal, till it covers the whole
extent of the human mind. The Christianity of
the Gospels is as broad as the Christianity of the
Summa of St. Thomas. But where the dispropor-
tion comes in is the efficacy and vividness of Christ's
Personality as realised by human souls. No books,
even divinely inspired, could create in the human
consciousness such a presence of a living God-man,
even if such books were constantly perused by the
believer.

It is the conviction of all Christians that Christ
enters into the secrets of their hearts, and that
they are answerable to Him for their innermost
thoughts. Christ is not only the object of their
worship, He is also the voice of their conscience ;
and more than that, He is their Judge, He is the
umpire of their eternal destiny. Here again it
could not be said that Christian conscience has
evolved a Christ not warranted by the authentic
records of Christianity. We have endless utterances
in the sacred Gospels and the Apostolic writings
stating most clearly Christ's judicial powers. ' For
neither doth the Father judge any man, but hath
given all judgment to the Son.' x

It is the common teaching of theologians that
there is in man a life that is inaccessible to the gaze
even of the greatest spirits. God alone can read
the secrets of the human heart ; it is the most

1 St, John vt 22.

THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 13

incommunicable portion of our being ; it is there
that we show practically our individuality. The
stronger the man or the woman, the less ready is
he or she to reveal' that inner self. Perhaps a
man in his whole life finds only one other man to
whom he opens the treasure-house of his thoughts,
and it may even be asserted that most men go
through life with their hearts sealed. Readiness
to manifest one's innermost thoughts, unless it be
to a mind entirely in sympathy with one's own and
thoroughly trustworthy, is not a sign of manliness ;
it belongs to the superficial, to people who have
no deep life of their own. Now it is into that
portion of our life that Christ, the Son of God and
the Son of Man, has penetrated, according to
invariable Christian conviction. It is impossible for
a Christian to doubt the universality of Christ's
knowledge as to the secrets of our hearts. Are we
not habitually convinced of Christ's human way of
discerning the secrets of our hearts ? For us it is
essentially a human knowledge possessed in a human
and created manner. To speak in metaphors, we
know that every one of our thoughts falls into one
of the scales of supreme justice, but the scales are
Christ's human mind and human heart ; the im-
pression made on the scales is a human impression
— a created factor. Such is the Christ of practical
Christian experience.

CHAPTER III

CHRIST AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE
RELIGION

Christ's Personality is all-important in the religion
of Christ. ' Who is He ? ' and ■ What is He ? ' are
vital questions for Christianity. A religion outside
the circle of that wonderful personality may be a
most respectable system of morals and even of
doctrines, but it is not Christianity. It would
always be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
This English proverb is so telling that there is no
profanity in using it in conjunction with the great
drama of Christianity.

Christian religion can never be put on a par
with other religious systems, simply because it
is not a system but a Person. It cannot come
under the scope of the science called ' Comparative
Religion ' because its central facts — those facts
that constitute its differentiation from the other
religions of the world — are the manifestation of a
divine genius of infinite originality. Comparative
religion is a branch of human learning I revere

SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION 15

(deeply. I cannot conceive anything that could
become more fascinating for the mind than to find
out the parentage and relationship of the religious
thoughts of mankind to their hundredth remove.
But when all has been said, and everything has
been compared, the fact remains that there is only
one such being as Christ known to the religious
world. Or more exactly, the \ Christ-idea/ such
as it is found in the Gospels, in Christian theology
and Christian conscience, is so deeply original that
it defies all comparison. I say ' Christ-idea ' instead
of ' Christ ' in order to remain within the scope of
science. Science, being concerned with experiment
and observation, can observe the Christ-idea in the
world, as it is not a thing hidden under a bushel ;
it is seen everywhere in the world of to-day ; it is
the easiest of all tasks to find out from history what
it was in the past.

Nothing could show more clearly this deep
originality of the Christ-idea and its unique position
in the world of religion than the great religious
strifes within the Christian pale itself that filled, and
are still filling, the world with their shrill echoes.
Is it at all a thinkable situation that Mohammedans,
for instance, should quarrel amongst themselves
as to whether there were one or two persons in
their prophet, or whether the divine person in
him had absorbed the human person ; whether
there was a human will besides a divine will in

16 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

him ; whether there was the transubstantiation
of bread into his body, etc. ? . . . Yet Christians
have taken, and are taking, sides in those very
matters with a passion that comes from strong
feeling on those subjects. Our very dissensions,
therefore, make it evident that the Christ-idea
has no parallel or term of comparison anywhere
in the religions of the world.

The science of war, on land and on sea, is a
definite science. Books are written on it, and
mastered by young officers. But a Napoleon and
a Nelson are not merely instances of a complete
mastering of the science of war, they are war
geniuses who make epochs, who make the very
science of war to be different from what it was
before them. Such personalities cannot come
properly within the definitions of any war system.
So Christ cannot be classed by the science of Com-
parative Religion because He is what He is in
the religious world through His Personality. And
as His Personality has such characteristics as cannot
be found elsewhere, from the very nature of the
subject, Christ is beyond all religious classification.
Originality and classification exclude each other.
Now, is there anything more deeply original than
the Christ-idea ? No doubt there is much in the
practical Christian religion that resembles the
tenets and practices of other religious forms. There
is in mankind a vast store of religiousness, which

SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION 17

is part of human nature itself, or it may be derived
from more simple and more universal forms of
piety such as there were in some remote and
primitive state of human society. Then there is the
natural expression of religious fear and awe, which
is very analogous to the dread exhibited by the
higher animals for their master. There are again
certain subtle laws of the human spirit in its
higher operations, which laws will act almost
similarly, whether the ascetic be a Buddhist or a
Christian monk. Thus, for instance, the effort
of thought will make use of the same external
means, whether the spiritual man be in Tibet or
in Spain. But such things are merely the basic
elements of all asceticism. They are the things
that may be classified by the student and compared
amongst themselves and pigeon-holed. Being found
everywhere, they lack originality. But the moment
Christ comes on the scene, there is evidently some-
thing quite new happening in the religious world.

If I may once more press into service my com-
parison of the war genius, the great soldier called
Alexander or Napoleon fights with the old arms,
with the time-honoured means of men, and horses,
and weapons. Yet no man ever conquered as
swiftly as Alexander, or struck as decisively as
Napoleon. There is the old story of that martinet
of an Austrian officer who maintained that Bonaparte
was sure to be defeated because he did not follow

c

18 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

the rules of war, such as the officer had learnt them
in the military schools.

Christ wins the spiritual battle by making use
of the old, well-worn spiritual weapons ; but there
never was a victory like His victory, because it
consists in this, that He should ' draw all things
unto Himself.' He establishes His Personality,
and His success is complete then only, when men
have begun to understand who He is and what He
is. 'I have manifested Thy name to the men
whom Thou hast given me out of the world : Thine
they were, and to Me Thou gavest them ; and
they have kept Thy word. Now they have known
that all things which Thou hast given Me are from
Thee : because the words which Thou gavest me
I have given to them ; and they have received
them, and have known in very deed that I came
out from Thee, and they have believed that Thou
didst send Me/ 1

Spirituality is indeed indispensable to Christian
sanctity ; but the essence of Christian sanctity
is a personal relation with Christ's Personality.
Spirituality is a common possession of all mankind ;
it is mankind at its best, and therefore it is a
necessary outfit for Christ's elect. At the same
time there is a vast amount of genuine spirituality
outside the Christian circle. I might say that
even with the Christian soul its spirituality may
1 St. John xvii, 6, 7, 8,

SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION 19

be at times greater than its essential Christian
sanctity, as there is no practical or theoretical
contradiction in the supposition that the effort
after spiritual life, even with good men, may be
many times greater than their efforts at entering into
personal relation with Christ's Personality. I might
say even that they are spiritual men rather than
definitely Christian men, if we take the word
'Christian' to stand — as it ought to stand — for what
is characteristically Christ's work. The practical
realisation of the Christ-concept in the work of
sanctity admits of infinite gradation even where
there is Faith, and Hope, and Charity.

The Christian world is most prosperous, then,
when it possesses its Christ most fully.

The principle of Christ's Personality once
grasped changes one's spiritual life and lifts it
up to a plane of wonderful supernaturalness.
Spirituality itself may still be considered to be a
common element. Life in Christ is the glorious
secret of the new dispensation.

c 1

CHAPTER IV

CHRIST THE WONDERFUL

A great deal of man's happiness comes from the
power of admiration. To admire something is
like a stream of fresh water flowing over the soul's
surface ; children are so happy because for them
there is so much to wonder at. The deep solemnity
of their untarnished eyes is the solemnity of wonder-
ment. Woe to the man who has nothing to wonder
at ! his soul has lost all freshness, and his eyes are
lustreless and vacant.

If at any time of our lives we cease to wonder,
the fault must be all ours. The world in which
God has placed man is an eternal wonder ; admira-
tion is the only thing which establishes a kind of
equality and proportion between man and the
vast world in which man lives. We do not under-
stand the marvels of the universe. We see very
little of the universe ; we live, each one of us,
in a very small corner of it ; the universe is not
ours, but it becomes ours through admiration —
being so immensely greater than ourselves, we

CHRIST THE WONDERFUL 21

wonder at it, and our wonder grows as the immensity
of the universe opens out more and more to the
ripening intelligence. What we lose in proportion
we gain in admiration, and we feel all the happier
through our wonderment. It is the saddest thing
in the world to have one's lot cast with people
who have lost the gift of admiration. It is the
cruellest and darkest captivity of the heart ; it is
external and internal darkness. It is the hardest
purgatory of the soul ; it would be hell itself but
for the hope that the day will come that will set
us free from the companionship of the unwondering
souls, and place us amongst the spirits whose life is
unending admiration. Let me be surrounded with
the young and the infants, whose every movement
and every sound is the expression of some wonder-
ment, and I shall feel that my heart swells
again with a happiness it has not known since
childhood.

Christ the Son of God could never be man's
eternal life if He were not man's eternal wonder.
A Christ whom we could fully comprehend, whom
we could understand through and through, could
never be our life and our hope because we could not
wonder at Him any more. It is an indispensable
condition in all true and lasting admiration that
the object of our admiration should always be
greater than our knowledge of it, and that through
the growth of knowledge, far from finding limits

22 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

in the thing to be wondered at, we should be
convinced more and more of the inaccessibility
of those limits.

Love, no doubt, is born from knowledge and
understanding ; but short-lived and fragile would
be the love which would be commensurate with
knowledge and understanding. Love is best and
strongest there where we know enough of a person
to understand that there is in the person vastly
more than we actually know. Every genuine and
undying love lives not in the Holy of Holies, but
merely in the Holy with its eyes fixed on the
unapproachable Holy of Holies.

We find strong love for Christ the Son of God,
a love that is as fresh as a spring morning, as
unchanging as the eternal hills, only where there is
the belief in Christ's divine nature, because then
alone the created spirit has a scope for endless
wonderment. Love dies when it finds a limit ;
limits are incompatible with love. If a good
man's motive is explained to me, I shall wonder
at his courage and unselfishness not so much on
account of what he did, as on account of the
character which the deed reveals. If I knew
the man to be incapable of another such act, I
could not love and admire him any more ; in fact,
my sentiment towards him is shaped much more
by what I suppose him to possess than by what I
saw him do. To make of Christ a human being

CHRIST THE WONDERFUL 23

is to deprive Him of the attribute of incompre-
hensibility ; sooner or later we shall understand
Him fully. Such theology would be the cruellest
thing, as it kills in the soul the most life-giving
element of all religion — wonderment that is always
old and always new.

All admiration comes from depth. We admire
what we know to be inexhaustible, unfathomable.
It must be deep calling out to deep, if admiration
is to be whole-hearted and overpowering.

Our Lord is indeed the Wonderful because in
Him deep calls out to deep, because in Him there
is a succession of spiritual regions, the one more
beautiful than the other. Our Lord is not some-
thing simple, He is something very complex, some-
thing very deep, and it is only unhealthy minds
that require a simple Christ, so simple indeed as to
leave Him without grace and divinity. The first
article of the Christian creed concerning our Lord's
Sacred Person is this : He is one Person in two
Natures. This duality of natures, so indispensable
to Christian theology, is the great wonder, is the
thing that makes Christ wonderful, because through
that duality deep calls out to deep. There is in
Him a human nature full of grace and truth ; but
when that human nature is searched into, it gives
at once evidence of something deeper still — the
divine nature. But this duality is merely the
shortest possible expression for multiplicities of

24 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

beauty which Catholic theology has undertaken
to describe. Our Lord has all the perfections of
man, He has the perfections of Divinity itself,
and He has a perfection which is all His own —
something between angelic perfection and Divinity.
Those gradations of perfection, I repeat, unhealthy
minds reject as burdensome ; they crave for a
simple Christ, but the simplicity they crave for is
more the characterless transparency of common
glass than the wonderful power of the hard diamond
with its innumerable facets and its scintillating
multiplicity. This gradation of perfections in our
Lord's Person, so noticeable in Catholic theology
on our Lord, is what makes Him so wonderful,
because it is deep calling out to deep ; or, to change
the metaphor, it is mountains rising up higher and
higher, and when you have reached one summit
you find yourself at the foot of another giant
amongst the mountains. So we find in practice
that the most innocent and most loving of Christ's
faithful revel in the theology of Christ's duality of
natures, because a simple and loving follower is
a born admirer, and his only fear is lest perchance
a day might come when he could not admire any
more. In this spirit then let us try to understand
the wonderful multiplicity of Christ's perfections
such as it is taught by Catholic theology.

In following the teachings of Catholic theology
concerning our Lord's Person we are like the

CHRIST THE WONDERFUL 25

explorer whose mission it is to find out the course
of a river. There are two ways of doing it. Sailing
first for days on the endless expanse of the ocean,
he comes to the mouth of some mighty Amazon,
where it is difficult for a long time to distinguish
the river from the ocean. Up he sails towards
the river's source, borne onward by the inflowing
tide as it contends for mastery with the current.
After many days of journeying the river will
lose to him its individuality ; it is not one,
but many rivers he has to explore ; it is the water-
shed he is interested in more than in the individual
river. Or, if the traveller chooses, he may begin
his expedition on the mountain-top, follow one
course, go down with it to the main stream, sailing
down the main stream in the consciousness that
sooner or later he will find himself entering the
boundless ocean. There is a particular joy in the
anticipation that the stream that carries him will
become a limitless sea.

This second way of exploring would be more
conducive to admiration than the first, because
a traveller thus progressing from the mountain
spring towards the ocean, passes from marvel unto
marvel till all the marvels are merged in the marvel-
lous ocean. This last simile represents the natural
mode for man to find out the marvels of the Son
of God. There is first His external human life ;
it is the mountain stream, fresh, powerful, of

26 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

heavenly transparency, running in the deep ravines
of His human sufferings. This mountain stream
of the mortal life is absorbed by His spiritual
life, His sanctifying grace, His angelic perfections
of intellect, His glorified body ; this again, vast and
infinite though it be, is absorbed finally by a much
greater infinitude — the infinitude of His Divinity.

St. Thomas acts not as the second but as the
first explorer : he begins from the ocean, the
Divinity, and follows up the great system of waters
to the human sources of Christ's life. A glance
at the disposition of the questions and articles in
the third part of the Summa shows clearly the
movements of this great theological explorer. He
begins with Hypostatic Union — the presence of the
Infinite Godhead in Christ ; then he speaks of
Christ's sanctifying grace, of Christ's supernatural
virtues. He speaks of Christ's grace as the head
of the human race ; he speaks of Christ's knowledge,
angelic and human ; he speaks of the human
power of Christ's soul, of His prayer, of His priest-
hood, of His adoption, of His predestination, of
His adoration, of His mediation. It is still the
main stream with the tidal movements of the ocean
mixing with its waters and swelling them. Then
he comes to the human life : Christ's virginal
conception, His nativity, His baptism, His doctrine,
His miracles, His passion, His death, His ascension,
His resurrection.

CHRIST THE WONDERFUL 27

I must crave the reader's indulgence for keeping
his attention to the simile of a water-course. In
order to be fully applicable to the present subject,
instead of supposing a system of converging streams
that come down from the mountain, we ought to
suppose a system of streams flowing on level land
so that the tides might come up to the very spring
of the most humble brook. Nature has no such
water system as far as I know ; if it had, it would
be a splendid illustration of a great mystery : the
merely human actions of our Lord, besides flowing
towards the infinitude of the Divinity, are con-
stantly being swelled by the tidal movements of
Divinity rushing along the channels of the human
actions, and mixing with the waters of human
sanctity. The stream that is a tidal stream has
a double nature, so to speak : first there are the
stream's own waters, and then there are the waters
of the sea, carried along the native waters of the
stream. So in the Wonderful there are many
streams flowing into streams, but over them all
there flow the waters of Divinity. No doubt it is
this penetration of Divinity into every human act
of Christ that compelled St. Thomas to adopt the
method of exploration from sea to land.

I shall adopt the same method here for the
instruction of those for whom this little treatise is
written ; the devotional method, however, which
is essentially the wondering method, begins with

28 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

our Lord's human life, begins with the ' Hail, full
of Grace ' and from the Virgin Mother, the sweet
daughter of David. Then it journeys to the Word
who dwells in the bosom of the Father, going from
sweetness unto sweetness. It is not the only
instance where the theoretical presentment of
heavenly things follows an opposite course to that
of the practical realisation of those things.

CHAPTER V

AN ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY

The word ' personality ' is a word to conjure with
in our own days. The power of personality is the
theme of every good work of fiction as well as of
every good biography. A theological writer is of
all writers the one who might be seen biting his quill
for long moments of embarrassment for lack of the
proper word, as society has taken his word from
him and given it a different meaning. The term
' personality ' holds as great a place in theology as
in literature, but the roles it acts are vastly different.
It is true that the more modern meaning of person-
ality— a powerful individualistic character — is not
unwelcome to a theologian, as his Christ is the most
winsome of all persons ; but he has a much older
right to the term ' personality/ and in his attempt to
explain Christ's attractiveness he has to delve down
in the hidden mysteries of much more austere
concepts, and personality is winsome because it is
something so solid ; and it is with this view of
personality, as the austere foundation of being, that
the theologian is primarily concerned.

30 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Locke's definition, or rather description, of
' person ' is as good as any other, outside the Aristo-
telian and scholastic sphere of thought. ' This
being premised to find wherein personal identity
consists, we must consider what person stands for.
Which, I think is a thinking intelligent being, that
has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as
itself, the same thinking thing in different times and
places ; which it does only by that consciousness
which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems
to me, essential to it : it being impossible for any-
one to perceive without perceiving that he does
perceive.' l

With Locke, the orthodox theologian says ' that
a person is (essentially) a thinking, intelligent being ;
that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself,
as itself, the same thinking thing in different times
and places.' The scholastic applies a similar defini-
tion to Deity itself, to the pure angelic spirit and to
man. Yet, to the scholastic mind, Locke's defini-
tion of a person is not adequate. The scholastic
asks with Locke why is it that a thinking being can
think of itself, as itself, and it is his answer to that
question that shows in him the deeper metaphysi-
cian. The English philosopher says that a thinking
being thinks of itself, as itself, ' by that consciousness
which is inseparable from thinking.'

Locke makes consciousness the reason of self-

1 Locke on Human Understanding, book ii. c. 27.

ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY 31

consciousness, which is evidently a tautology. It
is as if I defined my power of running through that
movement that makes me run. The scholastic,
though defining a person a thinking being, with self-
consciousness (' to consider itself as itself ' is another
expression for self -consciousness), has a deeper
underlying metaphysical element which saves him
from Locke's tautology, and it is that deeper under-
lying element which is the cause, so to speak, that
makes the individual person. Self -consciousness,
deep and mysterious as it is, is not so deep and so
mysterious as self -being. The first is merely a result
of the second. Now, the scholastic maintains that
self-being underlies self-consciousness, as the cause
underlies its effect, and he says that a person is
constituted primarily through self-being, through the
fact of having one's being as an exclusive and total
property.

We all know Tennyson's immortal verses
describing the gradual formation of the individual
self -consciousness .

The baby new to earth and sky,

What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,

Has never thought that ' this is I : '

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of 'I,' and ' me,'
And finds ' I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.'

32 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

So rounds he to a separate mind,

From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath,

Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death.

In Memofiam, xlv.

Yet this very evolution of the thought of the
isolated ' I ' supposes an isolated possession of
existence at the start. Now it is that perfect
appropriation of being by the ' 1/ long before
there is a conscious distinction of oneself from
other beings, the scholastic considers as the thing
that makes a person. Scholastics are divided
amongst themselves how to explain such an exclusive
appropriation of being. Such differences of opinion
cannot detract from the metaphysical value of
the main principle, that a person is radically and
eternally sui juris, a rational being with rights,
and responsibilities, and duties that can never
be shifted on to some one else's shoulders. Person-
ality means incommunicable appropriation for
weal and for woe of one's deeds. The highest
manifestation of personality is moral merit and
moral demerit, the fact through which a free act
of the rational will is so entirely the property
of the rational agent that God Himself cannot
be held responsible for it, in the last instance,

ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY 33

without contradicting Himself. Moral responsibility
is well calculated to open out to us a view of the
might of personality. Let us think for one moment
that both highest bliss in heaven and profoundest
misery in hell are states for a spirit which God
Himself could not transfer to another spirit without
injustice.

Self-consciousness — the pet metaphysical reality
of modern philosophies — is not so deep and so
permanent a thing as moral responsibility, that all-
important factor of Christian philosophy. A man
may be perfectly conscious of his doing a certain
act without his being responsible for it, as there
is the possibility of his not having been a free
agent in the matter.

The fact of moral responsibility is the most
immediate result of the element that makes a person.
Moral responsibility is not that element itself,
but it is its firstfruit — its direct result. In moral
responsibility we show that we have our being in
our own hand. How could I ever be made to
answer eternally for an act of mine, if that act
were not mine with the exclusion of every other
moral or ethical partnership ?

Self-consciousness is near the root of our being,
but it is not the root yet, and there is even the
possibility of the act of which I am conscious not
being all my own act.

Moral responsibility is much nearer that root,

D

34 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

for it implies in the last instance an exclusion of
every other created will in my act of will. But it is
not the root yet, just as will is not the whole man,
the whole spirit. It springs from the root, and the
root itself is personality. For a person is essentially
a rational being that has responsibility, or, anyhow,
may acquire it in time.

Moral responsibility is to my mind the natural
key to the mystery of personality.

It may be objected that moral responsibility
is too theological a fact to be made into a starting-
point for the quest of personality, chiefly moral
responsibility that stretches into the next world.
My answer is that I am writing a theological book,
not a philosophical one, for people to whom moral
responsibility, implied in the words ' merit ' and
1 guilt/ is an intellectual certainty.

Moral responsibility and self -consciousness
almost seem to touch in the phenomenon of the
consciousness of duty, of the conviction — intellectual
if there ever was one — embodied in the notion : I
ought. Yet the two things, though converging,
are still different. Moral responsibility is a fact
quite independent of inner consciousness, or rather
we know that we have the merit as well as the
guilt of our practical answers to the ' I ought '
as we have followed the voice or have disobeyed it.

There is an old scholastic axiom, ' Actiones sunt
suppositorum ' — ' Acts belong to the person/

ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY 35

Nothing could be truer, if we bear in mind the
mystery of personal responsibility for our deeds.

I should describe personality as that reality
within the creature that makes the creature's
acts to be entirely his acts, with their full responsi-
bility— a responsibility stretching into eternity.
It matters comparatively little how we explain
that great appropriation of being that under-
lies responsibility. That it is a wonderful and
potent reality is clear to all those who admit moral
responsibility. That it is a reality that pervades and
dominates our whole being is again manifest from
the results of responsibility, which affects our whole
life, for weal or for woe. It is necessarily what
schoolmen call a ' substantial ' reality, a reality that
is not merely accidental but one that is co-extensive
with the individual being itself.

Before leaving this chapter I must say a few more
things in order to remove certain misgivings that
might arise in our minds at the hearing of some
expressions made use of here as, for instance,
1 appropriation of being/ ' exclusive possession of
being/ ' exclusive responsibility of one's moral
acts.' Is it not the first rudiment of piety to
believe firmly that our being is the property of God,
from whom we have received it ; that our good
acts, chiefly of the higher, the supernatural order,
are the doings of the Spirit of God within our own
created will ?

' D 2

36 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

The answer to such difficulties will be a further
illustration of the greatness of created person-
ality. Nothing is truer than the fact that all
our being comes from God, by creation. But
God's creative power is, so to speak, at its best
in the production of a being that is so complete
as to have a responsibility all of its own, just as
God has responsibility. Pantheism, which means
emanation of things from God, as opposed to
creation of things ex nihilo, is warded off most
conclusively by that duality of responsibility.
That God should be able to produce outside
Himself a being whose very constitution brings
about within itself a responsibility that may put it
eternally into opposition to the God that created
it is the greatest achievement of God's creative
power. So likewise with the share of God's grace
in our moral acts, both natural and supernatural.
No amount of divine influxus will ever take away
the fact that it is my own act. St. Thomas would
say that the divine influxus is of such a nature
as to make my act more mine than ever. Such
is his constant answer to objections about the
preservation of free will under the divine influxus.
Just as God's creative act at its highest results
in a personality distinct from Him, so God's elevat-
ing act — this is a good expression for the super-
natural influxus of grace — results in a meritorious
deed that is the free will's own glory.

ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY 37

I have said already that even amongst school-
men there are accidental divergences of opinion
as to the precise definition of that far-reaching
element in the created being that makes for absolute
duality between God and His rational creature,
even when God fills His creature with the graces
of His own Spirit.

The older philosophy takes a personality to
be something entitatively static. The modern
philosophies make it into something that is
practically all dynamic.

The older philosophy has the great advantage
over its modern sister that it does the one thing
and omits not the other. It allows for all that
love of life which is the characteristic of dynamic
philosophy. The older philosophy grants all and
every one of the transient phenomena of psychic
life postulated by modern thought. But behind
the phenomena of conscious life there are for the
schoolmen the static and stable elements from
which life with its endless variations flows, and
which give it continuity and oneness.

Personality is one of those static elements ;
perhaps it is the principal static element ; it is
the centripetal power in our very complex
individualities — centripetal precisely because it is
static. Such stability is not only perfectly recon-
cilable with the perennial flow of our conscious
psychic life ; it is its salvation, just as the deep

38 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

banks of a river keep the river from becoming a
nondescript swamp. Or better still, personality,
the static thing in man, is to consciousness, the
dynamic thing in man, what the mighty mountain
range is to the stream : in its soaring solitude and
unbending solidity flows the winding stream with
all the charm of its rippling motion and babbling
song.

Before concluding the chapter I want to
emphasise once more that the thing which I call
moral responsibility is not personality itself, but
that it is an element of personality, and in its
brightest manifestation responsibility allows us a
deep plunging peep into the abysmal mystery of
personality.

CHAPTER VI

THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN PERSONALITY
BY DIVINE PERSONALITY

It is the oldest and truest expression of the
philosophy of the Incarnation to say that in Christ
there is no human personality, but that the human
personality in Him has been ' replaced ' by Divine
Personality. The great struggles of orthodoxy
against Nestorianism resulted in the adoption of
this formula by the Church. Christ is a human
individual nature, without a human personality ;
in Him the Divine Personality of the Word does
the functions of the human personality, and it
does infinitely more, as behoves a Divine Personality.
The maintenance and reality of the one individual
human nature, detached as it were from its congenital
and native element of created personality, and
endowed with Divine Personality, is another dogmatic
result, brought about by the Church's long strife
with Eutychianism and its various ramifications.
The separability of personality from the individual
rational nature by Divine Omnipotence, and its

40 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

' replacement ' by a Divine Personality, must
always be factors of Christian metaphysics, if our
system of thought be such as to allow for Hypostatic
Union.

Any sanctification, any unction of the Spirit,
any supernatural grace that is not a substitution
of human personality in Christ by the Personality
of the Word, is not Incarnation, is not Hypostatic
Union ; it is merely one of the ordinary works of
supernatural grace. There are no limits to the
powers of the Holy Ghost, to the ways in which He
may elevate the rational creature above its own
plane to a similarity with God. But sanctifying
grace carried to its millionth power could no more
be Hypostatic Union than extreme cultivation of
voice in me could be a training of my mathematical
powers. Hypostatic Union is a marvel of a different
order, though not so different as not to be found in
the same rational being, as not to have certain
secret affinities with it.

Hypostatic Union requires first of all the absence
of a congenital element in the individual nature :
its native created personality. All the other
supernatural elevations, worked by the Holy Ghost,
far from starting with the absence of some natural
endowment, presuppose on the contrary every
native perfection and responsibility.

The missing, or rather discarded created element,
finite personality, is not elevated or glorified by

REPLACEMENT OF PERSONALITY 41

the Holy Ghost, but it is ' replaced ' directly by a
reality of the same order but of infinite altitude, the
Personality of the Word. The ideas contained in
the terms ' elevation ' and ' replacement ' express
well the mutual relation of ordinary sanctification,
even of the highest order, and Hypostatic Union.
The Holy Ghost elevates to a higher plane the
existing realities of the rational creature in ordinary
sanctification. In Hypostatic Union the Second
Person of the Trinity takes the place of a created
element that ought to be there under ordinary
circumstances, but has been left out to give place
to an infinitely adorable substitute.

Such replacement could never come about, in
a creature, unless the replacing Personality were
Infinitude itself.

First, infinite power is required to interfere in a
created being with the element of personality, for
only a God of infinite creative power could make
a responsible personality exist outside Himself ;
personality is God's divinest work, and as He alone
places it within the creature, He alone can give it
a substitute.

Secondly, such replacement requires what I
might call Infinitude of subtleness on the part of
the Person, thus superseding inside an individual
created nature its congenital personality.

Thirdly, there must be in the replacing Person-
ality an Infinitude of personal worth, precontaining

42 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

in its oneness all the created personal worth possible.
By personal worth I mean here the worth that
accrues to an individual rational nature from its
privilege of being such and such a person, with
respective rights and responsibilities that stretch
into eternity. Now, our masters in theology are
far from being blind to the fact that not to possess
its native congenital personality would be to the
rational nature an immense disadvantage, un-
less the substitute be not only infinite, but also
such as to precontain in itself what it comes to
replace.

Suppose it to be a metaphysical possibility
that my personality might be replaced, say, by the
personality of a high spirit, it would be doubtful
whether I should be the gainer or the loser. A
finite spirit could never replace within me a con-
genital, essential element of my being without my
being less myself.

But with the second Person of the Trinity, in
whom all things are as in their eternal prototype,
Christ's humanity has acquired boundless riches
of personal worth, though it be without a created
personality. For Divine Personality is infinitely
congenital to it. Nothing short of this replacement
or substitution by Divine Personality of created
personality will do justice to the traditional view
of Christ, the Son of God. I make so bold as to
say that Hypostatic Union, thus stated with

REPLACEMENT OF PERSONALITY 43

theological exactness, is indeed worthy of the
admiration of the keenest intellect. The whole
difficulty resolves itself into this question : Is it
possible for Infinite Personality to do inside an
individual created nature the function of finite
personality ?

It is in this, and in no other sense, that God is
said to become man.

No doubt many minds, unacquainted with
Christian theology, think of a transformation of
Godhead into manhood when they hear the phrase,
and they naturally revolt at it at once. Their
mental recoil would be more than justified if
incarnation were such a transformation.

But that the phrase should mean, as it does
mean, that Divine Personality ' does duty ' within
a human nature, for a created personality they
seem hardly to realise ; yet it puts quite a different
face on the matter.

Other theologies, still admitting an incarnation,
at their best speak of a mere indwelling of Godhead
in the Man Christ, an indwelling of indefinite
character, and bristling with metaphysical diffi-
culties, when one comes to probe it.

Catholic theology, the child of the great councils
of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, by adopting
the ' replacement ' of personality by Personality,
whilst giving the link that unites Godhead and
manhood in Christ — a link that is almost palpable —

44 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

has not burdened man's intellect with a revolting
metaphysical novelty.

That there are within the human individuum
separabilities, if not actual separations of realities,
is practically admitted by every serious system of
philosophy. No philosopher could dream of man
as of a non-composite being. Our dogma goes, it
is true, to the root-separabilities, and thinks of
Deity as being capable of replacing certain created
elements without there arising pantheistic results.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONTINUANCE OF THE HUMAN NATURE
IN CHRIST

The present chapter is written in order to explain
how the concept of a Divine Person absorbing and
replacing the individual human nature in Christ
would be pantheistic, whilst there is no pantheism,
but a most glorious assertion of God's ' personal-
ness/ in the replacement of human personality by the
Personality of the Word. It is the oldest and most
sacred of Christian dogmas that with this mysterious
substitution of personality, Christ's human nature
is as entire and as intact as my own nature. He is
as perfectly human as I am. His humanity has
indeed been immensely elevated by every kind of
supernatural grace, but it has not been replaced
— nothing in it has been superseded. How an
individual nature is a distinct reality from per-
sonality I have already explained. Therefore
there remains the necessity of showing how the
Incarnation could never be a substitution of nature
without its giving rise to monstrous philosophical

46 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

consequences, whilst there are no such alarming
results with the substitution of personality.

Nature is essentially the stream of life, born in
the mountain fastnesses. It is all movement, all
activity, all consciousness. Modern philosophies,
being essentially dynamic and phenomenalist, are
nature philosophies ; they are hardly ever per-
sonality philosophies ; they only busy themselves
with modes of acting, without bothering about
modes of being, and in their own generation they
have been wise enough. Now, the idea of a stream
suggests to me a comparison, which I think very
useful in this most abstruse matter. Engineering
skill has replaced for many a stream, at least
sectionally, its original banks with artificial banks.
There is no end to the power of the engineer ; if
he be given time and money, he might replace the
banks of the Rhine with a stone dyke from Switzer-
land down to the North Sea. But no engineer,
with an empire to finance him, will ever replace
the stream itself by one of his own invention.
The birth of streams belongs to the unalterable
cosmic laws. I must crave the reader's pardon
for suggesting an analogy between man's mechanical
achievements and this most spiritual subject,
Hypostatic Union. But have we not a great
authority to justify the use of similitudes ? ' And
with many such parables He spoke to them the
word, according as they were able to hear.' 1
1 St. Mark iv. 33.

CONTINUANCE OF HUMAN NATURE 47

Let the stream stand for individual nature.
That God should in His own Person be personality
to it is like replacing the original banks of the
river with a more durable one. But that Godhead
should replace nature itself would mean that
the river is no longer the river it was ; it has lost
its identity. It would not be a stream of life
that comes from earthly sources ; it would be
simply an outflow of Divinity.

But to return to more exact thought, life cannot
be replaced by a Higher Life ; thought cannot be
replaced by Higher Thought ; consciousness cannot
be replaced by Higher Consciousness : but life, and
thought, and consciousness may be appropriated
by a Higher Owner. The function of nature is
to live; the function of personality is to own.

CHAPTER VIII

'AMEN, AMEN, I SAY TO YOU, BEFORE ABRAHAM
WAS MADE, I AM.' *

The text that I chose for the title of this chapter
is one of the many passages of the Gospel narratives
that show how even medieval theology, with all its
high metaphysics of the Incarnation, never goes
beyond the theology of the Evangelist himself.
It may state the matter in terms different from
those of the inspired writer, but it does not state
anything beyond the inspired writer's expression.

The above text is quite clear ; its authority
is undoubted ; the Jews saw the purport of Christ's
solemn asseveration : He gave Himself the age
of the Deity itself. They pick up stones to punish
the blasphemy there and then.

The declaration of His having unchanging
divine existence, implied in the words ' Before
Abraham was made, I am/ was not, humanly speak-
ing, directly intended by Christ, but was brought

1 St. John viii. 581

• BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS MADE, I AM ' 49

about by the allusion of the Jews to the death of
Abraham and to Christ's comparative youth. It
was the Jews, not Christ, who introduced the subject
of Abraham. The unexpected turn the contro-
versy took shows how clear to Christ's consciousness
was the realisation of His own superiority to time
and space. I now quote a casual remark of St.
Thomas, which he makes in connection with some-
thing else, but which shows that the mind of the
great theologian habitually moved in a sphere which
I might call the sphere of St. John's Gospel. The
doctrine contained in the remark is an intellectual
consequence of the metaphysical principle laid
down by St. Thomas for the understanding of the
Hypostatic Union. Yet intellectual consequence
though it be, it is a natural commentary on the
Gospel text quoted above. ' Although the human
nature in Christ be something new, nevertheless
the personality of that human nature is not new,
but eternal. And as the name "God" is predicated
of the man (Christ) not in virtue of the human
nature, but in virtue of the personality, it does
not follow that in the Incarnation we introduce
a new God. But such a consequence would follow,
if the man (in Christ) had a created personality,
as those who put two persons in Christ (Nestorians)
would be compelled to speak.' x Before Abraham
was made, Christ is, because eternal Personality
1 Quest, 16, art, 2, ad 3 urn,

50 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

has replaced created personality. The thing re-
presented by the term ' is ' belongs to personality.
Christ had eternal Personality, therefore He is
eternally.

Christ's human nature did not exist from
eternity ; it was formed in Mary's womb. But
it exists in virtue of an eternal existence, the Divine
Personality. Suppose a man had lost his eyes or
his hand ; suppose the eyeball or the hand to be
restored to him by Divine Power — it is certain
that the eye or the hand would be much younger
than the man's main organism. At the same
time the new members would share the age of the
whole organism, as they share its general vitality
and power of existence. This comparison is used
by St. Thomas in order to express how there is
oneness of being, oneness of existence, and therefore
oneness of age in Christ's Personality, though there
be in Him the human element inserted at a given
period of history into the vitalities of Divine
Personality.1

The seventeenth question, from which the
comparison is taken, is what may be considered
the sublimest height of the metaphysics of the
Incarnation. It contains two articles, and the
second article is the climax of speculative thought :
' Whether there be only one "to be " in Christ/ The
answer is in the affirmative.

1 Quest. 17, art, 2»

' BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS MADE, I AM ' 51

The replacement of personality which I have
spoken of is the definition of Christian councils.
It would be a sufficient formula to enable us to
state the mystery. St. Thomas has drawn all his
conclusions from that great ecclesiastical definition.
All our views of Christ, all our love for Him, are
not only modified by it, but actually born of it.
But when St. Thomas begins to raise the question
whether there is only one existence, one ' to be/ in
Christ, he evidently dares a high thing, more than
seemed to be originally authorised by the language
of the councils. Yet an affirmative answer to the
question is the only thing that does justice to words
like those of the text : ' Amen, Amen, I say to you,
Before Abraham was made, I am/ That human
organism that speaks, IS, exists, has being in virtue
of the existence that is Eternity itself, just as the
miraculously restored eye lives in virtue of the
life of the old organism. For St. Thomas, the con-
clusion that eternal existence is the existence of
the nature formed in Mary's womb seems to offer
no difficulties. He arrives at it as calmly as you
arrive at the conclusion that you want food when
you are hungry. Existence follows personality, he
says ; for it is only a personality that makes a
rational nature exist finally. Now, Christ's human
nature has Divine Personality ; therefore it has
Divine Existence. It is God, because it exists
through God's existence. Such is the meaning

E 2

52 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

of that wonderful second article of quest. 17.
Its calmness is as surprising as its speculative
sublimity. Like the Divine Master who thought
it no profanation to utter the words, ' Before
Abraham was born, I am/ in spite of the uproarious
tumult it raised amongst the Pharisees, St. Thomas,
the great master of theology, thinks it no exaggera-
tion to say that Christ's humanity has the same
existence with the eternal God. After all, it is a
smaller truth than to say that it has the same
personality with the eternal God.

CHAPTER IX

HOW COMPLETELY OUR LORD'S HUMAN NATURE
IS DIVINE

St. Thomas (second question) asks himself this
question : Is Hypostatic Union natural to Christ
as man ? One sees the meaning of his interrogation.
We have said that Hypostatic Union is nothing
else than the personal existence of the Word, being
directly the existence of Christ's soul, and of
Christ's body.

The question, then, of St. Thomas is this : How
far is this union between Divine Personality and
human nature natural to the human part of our
Lord's Person?

First of all, it could not be natural in the sense of
its flowing as it were from the human, the created
part of Christ ; a creature of whatever rank could
never have in itself the power of such a union.

It all comes from above. There is, however,
another point of view. Our Lord's human part never
was without that divine existence ; neither His soul
nor His body existed even for one instant in an un-
divine way ; and it is on that account that it may be

54 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

said that Hypostatic Union is natural to Our Lord as
man, because as man He never knew any other sort
of existence. It does not seem to imply contra-
diction that an adult human personality should be at
a given moment hypostatically united with a divine
person. But in that case, Hypostatic Union could
not be called natural, as it succeeded a created
human personal existence, and the Mother of that
hypostatically assumed human nature could not
truly be called the Mother of God. Our Lady, on
the contrary, is truly the Mother of God, because
Her Child never existed otherwise than as the Son
of God.

However, we have not exhausted the subject
yet. There is one more way for our Lord's human
nature to be naturally divine, more excellent than
the mere fact of His never having been anything
but divine. It is this. The mode of Our Lord's
formation in the womb of His Blessed Mother was
such that the result had to be human nature with
divine existence. She conceived from the Holy
Ghost, and conception from the Holy Ghost is
necessarily the origin of a nature that must have
divinity. So Our Lord as man is naturally God,
because the way in which He was conceived admits
of nothing else.

This is clearly expressed in the archangel's
message to Our Lady. ' The Holy Ghost shall
come upon thee, and the Power of the Most High

OUR LORD'S HUMAN NATURE 55

shall overshadow thee, and therefore also the
Holy that shall be born of thee shall be called the
Son of God.' He shall be called the Son of God,
precisely because the Holy Ghost will overshadow
her, so that Our Lord as man is God, in virtue of
his conception through the Holy Ghost.

It might be said therefore that in Hypostatic
Union the human nature is as divine as divine can
be, not only because it always has been divine, but
it is divine because, through the laws of the
conception, it had to be divine.

1 The grace of the (Hypostatic) Union is natural
to Him in His humanity according to a propriety
of His Nativity, as He was thus conceived from the
Holy Ghost, that one and the same person should
be naturally the Son of God and the Son of Man.' *

We ought never to think of Christ's humanity as
in any way separable from His Divinity, as prior to
it, or as being the object of a predestination by itself.
It was always divine, and according to St. Paul's
energetic expression ' Christ Jesus . . . being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery to be
equal with God.' a There seems to be no inherent
contradiction in the supposition that a living,
grown-up human person might be united with a
divine person hypostatically at a given moment.
Human personality, then, would be ' swallowed up '
by Divine Personality. But such a union would

1 Quest. 2, Art, 12. I Phil. ii. 6.

56 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

differ in many things from the Hypostatic Union
that is in Christ. The greatest difference, a differ-
ence which perhaps would constitute an infinite
difference, would be this, that in such a supposition
the human nature would not be divine by the very
laws of its conception and birth.

The hypothesis would safeguard Hypostatic
Union, but it would not be Christianity, and the
mother of the privileged human being would not
be the Mother of God ; she would be the mother
of a man who became God, which is a totally
different thing. The Church in her struggle with
Nestorianism established the doctrine not only of
the substitution of Divine Personality for human
personality in Christ, but also the title of Mary
to divine maternity, because her Son was conceived
in such a wise as to be necessarily God.

In my hypothesis the man thus elevated to
Hypostatic Union, though truly the Son of God,
would owe endless gratitude to God for the favour.
In the Hypostatic Union that is in Christ it could
not be said that Christ's humanity owes a debt of
gratitude for its privilege. It has Divine Person-
ality, divine existence through the laws of its
birth J ' Propter proprietates Nativitatis ipsius/ as
St. Thomas says in the article I have cited.

Nothing short of Hypostatic Conception can
give us a complete idea of Christ. His flesh is all
divine, and from the very beginning of the Nestorian

OUR LORD'S HUMAN NATURE 57

controversies, the champions of orthodoxy appealed
to the mystery of Christ's body in the Eucharist as
an argument in favour of the personal union, from
the very start, in Christ. ' This very fact that we
acknowledge that the only begotten Son of God
died in His flesh, rose and ascended into heaven,
qualifies us for offering the unbloody sacrifice in
the Church and, by participating in the holy flesh
and precious blood of the Redeemer, for receiving
the mystical blessing so as to be sanctified. We
receive it not as a common flesh, nor as the flesh of
an eminently sanctified man, or of one who has
received dignity by being united with the Logos
or by divine indwelling, but as the true life-giving
and proper flesh of the Word. For since He is,
as God is, in His own nature life, and is become
One with His own flesh, so has He imparted to this
flesh a life-giving power.'1 This profession of faith,
formulated in the council of Alexandria a.d. 430
under the presidency of St. Cyril, preparatory
to the great Ephesine council, shows how clear and
definite the views of Christian thinkers were as to
the extent of Christ's divineness.

There is one more consideration that finds a
natural place here : St. Thomas says2 that Hypo-
static Union is something created. This doctrine,
strongly emphasised by Aquinas, whilst containing

1 Hefele, History of Councils, in, 30,
a Quest. 2, art. 7.

58 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

a world of wisdom, might be easily misleading, as
implying apparently an inferiority of divineness for
Christ's humanity.

That Hypostatic Union is a created thing
ought to be clear to everyone, after a little thought.
In Hypostatic Union Divine Personality replaces
human personality ; or, what is more to the present
purpose, Divine Personality is united with an
individual human nature. Now such a union is
brought about by God's creative Omnipotence,
uniting the two extremes into the One Ineffable.
If creative Omnipotence did not intervene, a
human nature could never have divine existence,
Divine Personality, except in the pantheistic sense.
Personal being outside God is always the result
of a creative act of God. Now the circumstance
that personal being exists before — namely, the
second Person of the Trinity — does not alter the
case. It had to be given to an individual human
nature, and such granting, or such uniting, supposes
as much a creative act as the production of personal
being ex nihilo. In this sense Hypostatic Union
is something created, aliquid creatum. It is the
result of a created act, but a result that implies
a series of infinitudes. For though Hypostatic
Union be something created, in no sense is it
something finite. To be a created thing and to
be a finite thing are not necessarily synonymous.
Philosophers admit degrees in Infinitude : there

OUR LORD'S HUMAN NATURE 59

are greater infinitudes and lesser infinitudes. In
order to explain Hypostatic Union exhaustively,
no doubt every kind of infinitude ought to be
pressed into service : it is deep calling unto deep.
But one thing is certain : it has no finite element,
though it be a created marvel. Christ's human
nature no doubt has finite elements, but that thing
that makes the nature divine, Hypostatic Union,
is all made up of Immensity and Ulimitability.

CHAPTER X

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH

The commonest theological formula stating the
Mystery of the Incarnation is this : ' God was
made man/ We have scriptural authority for it
in the words of St. John's Gospel, first chapter :
' And the Word was made flesh/

St. Thomas makes an exhaustive study of the
various formulas that express the wondrous mystery,
in the sixteenth question of his third part of the
Summa. It shows amongst other things how
various were the aspects of the mystery known to
the great thinker.

Now the formula ' God was made man ' has
his full approval. It is a true statement. His
interpretation is this : ' God is said to have been
made man, because a human nature began to have
being through the personality of a divine nature
that pre-exists from all eternity/ l

In other words, for God to become man is merely

1 A d primum.

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH 61

the fact of a Divine Personality doing duty of
personality for a particular human nature. Such
office, Divine Personality did not exert from all
eternity, but started it in time, in the hour which
had been predestined. So it is both orthodox
and grammatical to say : ' God became man/

Many of us would feel easier in our minds with
that other formula, * Man became God,' as it
expresses better the elevation of human nature
through Hypostatic Union, as it seems to contain
no narrowing of the Godhead, but a broadening
of manhood. Yet St. Thomas rejects the formula
as misleading. His reasons are best given in the
third article of the thirty-third question, where
he treats of Christ's conception. I give his meaning.
1 We say with great propriety of language that God
became man ; but we cannot say with any propriety
that man became God. God merely assumed
what is human ; but this human element never
existed before the assumption. If it had existed
it would have had a separate personality. Now
it would be against the nature of Hypostatic Union
to unite Divine Personality with a pre-existing
complete human being having already personal
existence.'

In other words, the reason why it cannot be
said that man became God is this, that the human
part of Christ never had ' a personal existence of
its own.' The Godhead that created it in Mary's

62 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

womb performed the functions of personality in it
from the first moment of its existence.

This, and no other, is the reason why the two
propositions, ' God became man, and man became
God/ are not convertible propositions. Divine
Personality existed in Itself from eternity, before
it discharged the office of personality to a human
nature. But the human nature never existed before
it was given Divine Personality. Its creation and
its being raised to Divine Personality are not two
divisible moments.

But, on the other hand, St. Thomas admits the
convertibility of the two propositions : ' God is man,
and man is God.' It is the 'factum est * (' became ')
the theologian does not like when Christ's human
nature is spoken of in connection with the possession
of perfect Divinity. Only a pre-existing thing
becomes properly something new, has new relations,
new functions. St. John describes in his first
chapter the life of the Word before the Word
1 became flesh/ There is no history of Christ's
humanity before it ' became divine/ Its history
starts with its being supported in existence by
the Personality of the Word.

But man is God, and God is man. For some
minds the first formula is more prolific in spiritual
consolations ; for other minds the second formula
is more delightful. One is as good as the other,
from the point of view of theological accuracy.

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH 63

By the first we mean that Divine Personality has
replaced human personality ; by the second we
look directly at the human element having its
existence through Divine Personality. The first
is no narrowing down of limitless infinitude, the
second is limitless broadening of finiteness.

CHAPTER XI

A SCHOLASTIC HYPOTHESIS

It is not immensely more difficult to admit Hypo-
static Union than any other supernatural grace.
The moment we grant that Christ is a superman
in a way in which no other human being has been
or ever will be a superman, we are amongst those
who can no longer have any rational difficulties
against Hypostatic Union.

The Christ of the orthodox is essentially a
Christ so great that He cannot be the outcome
of a cosmic process, however prolonged and how-
ever potent that process may be ; Christ is what
He is through a direct action, or unction, to use
a scriptural word, on the part of the extra-mundane
Deity. That such unction should be the communi-
cation of Divine Personality itself, instead of mere
finite graces, is not a new difficulty. The super-
natural order once admitted, communication of
Divine Personality is merely the highest possible
form of supernatural elevation.

Here I should like to quote one of the side

A SCHOLASTIC HYPOTHESIS 65

issues of the theological doctrines on the Hypo-
static Union. St. Thomas, with his masterful
grip of the main question at stake, makes various
suppositions, which he answers with a view to
making the main point more clear. He asks
whether a divine person could have taken into
Hypostatic Union several individual human natures.
His answer is in the affirmative ; for no finite
number of individual human natures could ex-
haust the communicability of the Divine Personality.
In other words, the unction we call Hypostatic
Union could have been multiplied a millionfold
if God in His wisdom had chosen to do so, just
as other inferior graces are multiplied.

I dare say that with many minds Hypostatic
Union is a real difficulty because they shrink from
the thought of the Godhead being contained and
circumscribed within the limits of a created nature.
To them Incarnation seems hardly possible without
a loss to Divinity itself. Their instinct is right.
No amount of spiritual advantage in the creature
could ever be an adequate compensation for any
loss to the Majesty of the Godhead itself. In fact,
the idea implies contradiction. How could loss to
God ever be the creature's gain, as all the creature's
happiness is precisely in the creature's aspiration
to an immutably happy Divinity? A diminished
or humbled Godhead would be the creature's
greatest misfortune.

66 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Hypostatic Union leaves the potentialities of
Godhead as infinite as it found them. ' The power
of a Divine Person is infinite ; it cannot be limited
down to any created thing. Therefore we have
to say that the Divine Person did not take unto
Itself our human nature in such a wise as not to be
able to take up another nature. For in such a case
it would seem that the personality of a divine nature
is thus included within one single human nature, that
no other nature could have been united with
such a Divine Personality — a thing that is absurd.
'The uncreated can never be included within
the created. It is clear therefore that whether
we consider the Divine Person from the point of
view of its power, which is the (effective) principle
of the union, or whether we consider it from the
point of view of personality itself, which is the
goal of the union, we have to admit that the Divine
Person could have taken up a numerically distinct
human nature from the one which it took in fact.' *

With such views on the resources of Divinity,
the main objection against Hypostatic Union
falls to the ground. Hypostatic Union is infinite
glory and sanctity to the human nature without
its being the least fettering of the freedom of God-
head itself.

St. Thomas conceives the possibility of a higher
kind of Incarnation than the one which Faith

1 Pt. iii„ quest, s, art. 7.

A SCHOLASTIC HYPOTHESIS 67

teaches. A Hypostatic Union in which the three
divine persons take up one single individual nature.
The idea implies no contradiction. ' Non est im-
possibile divinis personis ut duae vel tres assumant
unam naturam humanam.' *

Even in this highest form of divine liberality
we find God's free choice, which is the charm of all
His gifts. Where there are many possibilities, He
chooses the one best adapted for a particular purpose.
Hypostatic Union is no exception to the rule of the
divine deliberateness in giving. Not only is Hypo-
static Union God's free election, but the kind of
Hypostatic Union He determines upon shows
infinitely wise thought. God is never overwhelmed
by His own liberalities. In the thirteenth century,
as much as in our own, there was the milk and honey
temperament of the optimist. I take optimism here
in its philosophical sense. I mean the man who
thinks that God ought always to do the best possible
thing, irrespective of the results on the purport of
the whole. So the idea that a Divine Personality
might have united with itself every human individual
in oneness of person made them ask the question
why God in His charity did not do so.

St. Thomas gives those big children satisfaction
(if a born optimist can ever be satisfied) in the
fifth article of the ninth question. ' If we all were
united hypostatically, there would not have been

1 Quest, 3, art, 6.

f 2

68 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

the marvel of marvels, the charity of Christ dying
on the Cross for us.' Such is the meaning of one of
his reasonings. It is a profound one, because it
shows that the great marvel in the whole mystery
of the Incarnation is not so much the initial fact of
the Hypostatic Union as the human life and death
of the God-man. ' I answer that the love of God
towards men shows itself not only in taking up the
human nature, but much more (prczcipue) through
the things He suffered in the human nature for other
men, according to Rom. v. 8, " God commendeth
His charity towards us, because when as yet we were
sinners, Christ died for us." This could not have
taken place, if He had taken up human nature in all
its representatives.' *

The divine act or fact of the Hypostatic Union,
wonderful as it is, is to the mind of the theologian
not the main point. The marvel of marvels is
the life of which the Hypostatic Union is the
beginning.

What a glorious theology ! Far from being
overpowered by the doctrine of a Divine Person
uniting a human nature in an indissoluble oneness,
it makes the value of such exaltation subservient
to the experimental sanctity of conscious life and
activity.

1 Pt. 3, quest. 5, art. 5, ad, 2i

CHAPTER XII

' INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM DIVINITATIS '

Speaking metaphorically, I said in a previous
chapter that the spiritual vitalities in Christ's
Person are like so many ramifications of a great
tidal river flowing on such even land as would allow
the waters of the ocean to mix with the waters of
the river over the whole course of the stream.

The great aim of our theology is to make Christ's
human nature as divine as possible whilst preserving
the real distinction between His humanity and His
Divinity. St. Thomas, by a rare stroke of genius,
has found the theological formula that states this
highest possible elevation of Christ's humanity by
His Divinity for the active purposes of the Redemp-
tion. Christ's humanity is to His Divinity a live
instrument, instrumentum conjunctum Divinitatis. It
is one of the finest concepts of Catholic theology, and
a concept too which is indispensable if the scriptures
have to be taken in their literal meaning. The
theory is briefly this : My arm and my hand are
the live or the joined instruments of my brain.

70 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Being vitally connected with my brain, there is
practically no limit to the perfection of rational
work my hand, with no gift of reason residing
in it, may achieve. The hand of Michael Angelo has
painted the Last Judgment and created the wonder-
ful Moses ; it was his hand that did it, but not his
hand alone, for from his brain there streamed into
his hand the creative power of genius. In scholastic
language Michael Angelo's hand would be the
instrumentum conjunctum of his brain.

Such is the view St. Thomas takes of Christ's
manhood. Because Godhead is united with man-
hood in one Person as brain and hand are united
in one organism, manhood is the hand of Godhead,
manhood does the works of God just as the human
hand does the works of human genius.

It is easy to see that St. Thomas has practically
introduced a tertium quid between Godhead and
manhood in Christ, something that is lower than
Hypostatic Union and at the same time is higher
than human nature, even in its loftiest state of
sanctification. The technical name for this tertium
quid is Divine Instrumentality. Highest in Christ
there is Hypostatic Union; lowest, there is immensity
of sanctifying grace ; between the two there
is Divine Instrumentality. It may be a matter
of regret that we have no expression for it that
reminds one less of mechanical things. St. Thomas
has always been satisfied with the word

' INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM ' 71

instrumentum, and it is the reader's duty to attach
to this term such meaning as will make it for him
the expression of highest spiritual reality.

I shall state now this great doctrine in the
words of St. Thomas himself ; in their conciseness
they open out wonderful horizons of spiritual possi-
bilities, of which we the redeemed are naturally the
beneficiaries. I quote from the second article of the
thirteenth question of the third part of the Summa.
' The soul of Christ may be viewed under a double
aspect. There is first the soul's congenital nature,
with its power either natural or gratuitous (i.e.
supernatural) ; then we may view the soul of Christ
as the instrument of the Word of God hypostatically
united with it. Speaking then of the soul of
Christ from the point of view of its congenital nature
and power either supernatural or gratuitous, the
soul of Christ has in itself the power of bringing
about those effects which are natural to the soul,
as, for instance, to rule over the body and to dispose
the human acts, and also to enlighten through
the fulness of its grace and knowledge all those
rational creatures who fall short of the perfection
which is in Christ's soul, in the way in which it
is possible for a reasoning creature to be thus
illuminated.

1 But if now we speak of Christ's soul from the
point of view of its being the instrument of the
Word united with it (hypostatically), from that

72 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

point of view Christ's soul had the instrumental
power to bring about all those miraculous changes
which in any way have any relation to the end of
the Incarnation, which is to restore all things
either in the heavens or on the earth. But such
changes in creatures as would bring about their
annihilation are the counterpart of the creation
of things out of nothing, and therefore as God
alone is able to create out of nothing, God alone
has power to annihilate creatures, for God alone
keeps beings in their existence lest they fall back
into nothingness. Therefore we must say that the
soul of Christ is not possessed with Omnipotence
concerning the mutation of created things/

We see therefore that there is only one exception
to the extent of Christ's power as the live instrument
of the Word : creation out of nothing and the
corresponding power of annihilation could not
be attributed to our Lord as man ; short of that,
there is nothing which Our Lord could not do.
The resurrection of the bodies at the end of the
world is perhaps the highest external manifestation
of Our Lord's power ; it is within Our Lord's power
to bring back to life every human organism, because
the resurrection of all flesh is not creation out of
nothing, but reconstruction out of previous materials.
* For as the Father raiseth up the dead and giveth
life, so the Son also giveth life to whom He will,
for neither does the Father judge any man, but

1 INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM ' 73

has given all judgement to the Son, that all men
may honour the Son as they honour the Father . . .
Amen, Amen, I say unto you, that the hour cometh
and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of
the Son of God, and they that hear shall live, for
as the Father has life in Himself, so He has given to
the Son also to have life in Himself. ... I cannot
of myself do anything. As I hear, so I judge,
and My judgment is just : because I seek not My
own will, but the will of Him that sent me.' x

' Now this is the Will of the Father who sent Me,
that of all that He has given Me I should lose
nothing, but should raise it up again in the last day ;
and this is the Will of My Father that sent Me,
that everyone who seeth the Son and believeth in
Him may have life everlasting, and I will raise him
up in the last day. ... He that eateth My
Flesh and drinketh My Blood has everlasting life,
and I will raise him up in the last day.'2

' Our conversation is in heaven, from whence
also we look for the Saviour, Our Lord Jesus
Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness,
made like to the body of His glory, according to
the operation whereby also He is able to subdue
all things unto Himself.' 3

1 Afterwards the end, when He [i.e. Christ] shall
have delivered up the Kingdom to God and the
Father, when He shall have brought to nought all

1 St. John v, 2 St. John vi. ■ Phil. iii. 20, 21.

/

74 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

principality and power and virtue ; for He must
reign until He has put all enemies under His feet,
and the enemy Death shall be destroyed last ; for
He hath put all things under His feet ; whereas he
says all things are put under Him, undoubtedly He
is excepted who put all things under Him, and when
all things shall be subdued unto Him, then the Son
also Himself shall be subject unto Him that put all
things under Him, that God may be all in all.' *

Texts like the foregoing — and it would be easy
to quote many more to the same effect — point
clearly to a power in Our Lord's Personality which
is not the power of the Godhead itself, but is a
power of Christ's manhood, and yet it is a power
which is almost omnipotent. Scholastic theo-
logians have expressed it in a formula of their own
coining : ' The instrumental power of Christ ' —
' Instrumentum Verbi Dei.' It expresses the most
wonderful thing in the simplest terms.

As I have already insinuated, from this central
principle there flow many spiritual possibilities ;
and here I want the reader to pay great attention
to another doctrine of St. Thomas which is merely
a corollary of the doctrine already enunciated.
Our Lord's life, death, resurrection, and ascension
are the instruments of Divinity for our sanctification,
our life, our resurrection, and our ascension. It
is clear, of course, that Our Lord is our model, in

1 i Cor. xv. 24-28.

* INSTRUMENTS! CONJUNCTUM ' 75

His life, death, resurrection, and ascension. It
is clear again that Our Lord through His life and
death atoned for us, merited for us, prayed for us ;
such causal influences on the part of Our Lord with
respect to mankind are called moral influences,
moral causes. But there is more, and there must
be more, if scriptural expressions as well as the
language of Catholic tradition are not to be treated
as hyperbolical. Christ's death is our life ; Christ's
resurrection is our resurrection.

There is nothing more instructive from this
point of view than to read the whole of the forty-
eighth question of the third part of the Summa :
' On the way in which Our Lord's passion brought
about our salvation.' First article : ' Did Christ's
passion cause our salvation by manner of merit ? '
The answer is of course in the affirmative. Second
article : ' Did Christ's passion cause our salvation
by manner of satisfaction ? ' Again the answer is
in the affirmative. Third article : ' Did Christ's
passion cause our salvation by manner of a sacrifice ? '
Again he says Yes. Fourth and fifth articles :
' Did Christ, and Christ alone, cause our salvation
by manner of redemption ? ' The answer is
affirmative to both parts of the question. Sixth
and last article : ' Did Christ's passion cause our
salvation by manner of efficiency ? ' (per modum
efflcientiae). Efficiency in scholastic language is
physical efficiency as opposed to a moral claim.

76 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

' My answer is this/ says St. Thomas ; ' there is a
double set of efficient agents, the principal agent
and the instrumental agent : the principal efficient
agent of the human salvation is God. But as
Christ's humanity is the instrument of Divinity, as
said already, through a direct consequence all the
actions and sufferings of Christ work out instru-
mentally under the power of Divinity the human
salvation, and therefore Christ's passion causes
human salvation by way of efficiency.'

In this same article St. Thomas quotes an
objection to this great theory. The objection is
this : There is no effective bodily action except
through contact ; but Christ's passion could not
have contact with all men ; therefore He could
not bring about the salvation of all men by means
of a physical efficiency. I quote the answer
literally : —

' To the second objection I reply that though
the passion of Christ be a bodily phenomenon,
it has spiritual power from the Divinity that is
united with it, and therefore it has efficiency by
means of a spiritual contact — that is to say, by
faith, and the sacrament of faith.'

This last clause, ' by faith, and the sacra-
ment of faith,' means this : that faith in individual
souls by which they are saved is caused by Christ's
passion, in the manner of an efficiency. To receive
faith is to be touched by Christ's passion. With

' instrument™ CONJUNCTUM ' w

greater clearness still is this doctrine stated in
the sixth article of the fiftieth question. There
St. Thomas asks whether Christ's death did any-
thing for our salvation. By death he means,
not exactly the act of dying, but the actual state
of death. There is an obvious objection : the
dead Christ could not merit, from the very fact
of His being dead ; therefore though the dying
Christ might merit, the dead Christ could not
do anything for us. ' Yes/ says St. Thomas,
1 the dead Christ could not be the cause of our
salvation, in the manner of merit, but he could
be a cause of salvation in the manner of an efficiency,
because even in death Divinity was not separated
from Our Lord's Flesh, and therefore whatever
happened to Our Lord's dead Body is to us a
source of salvation in virtue of the Divinity united
with it.'

The same doctrine occurs again with the causality
of Our Lord's resurrection. I cannot resist the
temptation of quoting once more; my quotation
is taken from the first article of the fifty-sixth
question. ' Christ's resurrection,' says St. Thomas,
! is the efficient cause of our resurrection because
Christ's Humanity precisely from being a risen
humanity is in a way the instrument of His Divinity,
and works in the power of the Divinity, and there-
fore as all other things which Christ did in his
Humanity or suffered in His Humanity are to us

?8 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

a source of salvation in virtue of His Divinity,
Christ's resurrection also is an efficient cause of
our resurrection through Divine Power, to whom
it belongs to quicken the dead ; for this Divine
Power is present to and has contact with all places
and all times ; and this contact of power suffices
to explain that efficiency of Christ's resurrection.'

In an earlier question of this third part of the
Summa1 St. Thomas has another application of this
great principle. Through it he explains the possibility
for Christ to be the life-giving Head to the heavenly
spirits in His Humanity. How could humanity be
to angelic spirits the source of spiritual perfection ?
■ Christ's Humanity,' says St. Thomas, ' in virtue
of the spiritual nature, that is the Divine nature,
is able to cause something (spiritual) not only
in the spirits of men, but also in the spirits of
angels, on account of that most intimate union
of the Humanity with God — that is to say, Hypo-
static Union.' Christ gives something spiritual
to the angels through His Humanity, but the
Humanity does it in virtue of the Divinity. It
is again the Divine Instrumentality.

I do not think I owe the reader an apology
for keeping him so long in these high theological
regions ; the Church's greatest divine, St. Thomas,
can never be understood unless we grasp his prin-
ciples of the Divine Instrumentality in connection

1 Quest. 8, art. 4.

' INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM ' 79

with our Lord's Humanity. If once we grasp it, it
becomes a most sweet, a most devotional principle.
We shall feel soon how near we are, after all, in
our spiritual life to Christ's life, death, and
resurrection. Nothing will surprise us any more
in what we read of the mystical unions of the
life of the saint with Christ's life. Infinite, un-
changing, all-present Divinity, for whom there
is no yesterday nor to-morrow, simply uses the
actions of Our Lord as a most beautiful tool for
the sanctification of souls. Christ's death on
the Cross is as truly and as directly the cause of
my sanctification in the hands of Godhead as
the pen with which I write is the cause of the
letters that cover the paper on which I write.
The mystical possibilities of this great theory
of St. Thomas are greater than anything we could
imagine.

In one of the above quotations from St. Thomas
the great doctor says that Christ's Humanity,
precisely because it is a risen humanity, is a fit
instrument in the hands of God to bring about our
own resurrection. We must remember what we
said at the beginning, that every instrument has a
fitness of its own for a definite and specific purpose.
Christ is the fit instrument of our resurrection
because He is a risen Christ. We may say like-
wise that Our Lord is a fit instrument of every kind
of sanctification and spiritual purification because

80 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

He has suffered in His Body, because at one time
His Body was a dead body ; through His passion
and death His Humanity acquired a most eminent
fitness to be in the hands of God the instrument of
the most miraculous graces and resurrections.

From all that precedes we see how the whole
supernatural world rests on the shoulders of Christ's
Humanity. In the whole work of our salvation
and sanctification Christ's Divinity does not come
in, except as the higher cause. We know that
Divinity is behind it all, yet Divinity, being infinite
truth and reality, never allows the Humanity to
shirk any work that may possibly be done by
Humanity. There is only one instance in which
Divinity as such is directly appealed to in the
work of our salvation : it is the adequate repara-
tion given to God's offended majesty. Of this I
shall say more later on. In everything else it is
the Humanity that does the work. It does it indeed
as the instrument of Divinity, but it does it none
the less directly.

To come back to our original comparison, we
may navigate for a long time on the stream of
Christ's human life and Christ's human perfection ;
we may do marvels like those that go down to the
sea, we may see great wonders long before we have
to come to the ocean of His Divinity.

The thought of this omnipotence of Our Lord's
Humanity ought to be to us a source of peace and

1 INSTRUMENTUM CONJUNCTUM ' 81

rest. ' These things I have spoken to you that in
Me you may have peace ; in the world you shall
have distress ; but have confidence, I have overcome
the world.' *

In Our Lord Himself we see the grandest realisa-
tion of a deep spiritual principle enunciated by Him
in the Gospel of St. Luke. ' He that has shall
receive and he shall abound, and he that has not,
even what he has shall be taken away from him/

Hypostatic Union, far from making Our Lord's
Humanity complete, requires in our Lord's Humanity
the presence of a new gift : the gift of sanctifying
grace.

Sanctifying grace is not Divinity itself, it is
something created ; it is the greatest possible
resemblance with God which a spirit may possess.
Sanctifying grace differs entirely from the Divine
Instrumentality spoken of above. Yet it is owing
to the fact of the Hypostatic Union and to the fact
of the Divine Instrumentality that sanctifying grace
is in Our Lord.

Sanctifying grace is a necessary concomitant
in Christ's soul of Hypostatic Union and Divine
Instrumentality. St. Thomas devotes the seventh
and eighth questions of the third part to Our Lord's
sanctifying grace. In the first article of the
seventh question he says that the reasons why there
must be in Our Lord sanctifying grace are precisely
1 St, Johm xvi. 33.

82 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Hypostatic Union and Divine Instrumentality.
Christ's soul is united with Divinity, but Christ's
soul is not Divinity itself. To be united with
Divinity does not make it into Divinity, there-
fore it must be made as divine as possible, it must
resemble Divinity as closely as possible ; this is done
through sanctifying grace. Union between two
is thinkable only when the two remain two distinct
beings in the union ; if they became one being it
would be no longer a union, but a fusion ; there-
fore in Hypostatic Union Our Lord's humanity
remains quite distinct. This is why the presence
of Divinity, far from rendering sanctifying grace
superfluous, makes its possession of much greater
necessity for Our Lord than for any other creature,
otherwise the union would be an ill-assorted
union.

Then again, from the point of view of Divine
Instrumentality, sanctifying grace becomes an abso-
lute necessity for Our Lord. ' Christ's Humanity/
says St. Thomas, ' is the instrument of Divinity,
but He is not like an inanimate instrument, which
has no action of its own, but is merely moved by a
higher agent ; He is, on the contrary, an instrument
that is animated by a rational soul, which in the
very act of being used has an action of its own, and
therefore for the sake of congenital action He was
bound to have sanctifying grace.'
1 Quest. 7, art. i.

• INSTRUMENTUM CON JUNCTUM ' 83

The whole Humanity of Christ must be thought of
as being first permeated with spiritual vitalities, such
as sanctifying grace, before it could be a fit instrument
for man's sanctification in the hands of God ; with-
out those spiritual vitalities the instrument would
have lacked natural fitness.

To what extent did our Lord possess sanctifying
grace ? Fulness of grace is constantly attributed to
our Lord. St. Thomas says it was not actually infi-
nite grace; but it was such a grace as to establish a
kind of proportion between Christ's soul and Christ's
Divinity. He has as much grace as is necessary
to make the union between the human soul and
Divinity a well-assorted union. God alone there-
fore could measure the extent of Our Lord's grace.
God alone could be judge of the measure of sancti-
fying grace that would make of Christ's Humanity
a fit and harmonious instrument in the hands of
Divinity.

It would be a dangerous tendency if the keen
realisation of our spiritual privileges and respon-
sibilities were to make us overlook Our Lord's
Humanity for the sake of something exclusively
spiritual. Catholic doctrine never detaches man's
attention from Our Lord's Humanity. Christ's
action as man is the greatest spirit-reality for the
redeemed soul. Where spiritual life is highest and
sincerest, devotion to Our Lord's Humanity is
tenderest and the feeling of dependence on Him

G 2

84 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

strongest. It may be stated as an unquestionable
principle that Our Lord in His manhood is to the
human spirit everything that makes it great and
happy.

We know little of Our Lord's relation with the
angels, except that He is the head and king of
angels ; but to the human spirit in the present life
and in the future He is much more.

The expressions of the inspired scriptures, where
are stated Our Lord's relations to man, and more
particularly to the soul of man, are astoundingly
energetic. Christ is made unto us wisdom, and
justice, and sanctification, and redemption. He is
our life, He is our resurrection ; as in Adam we all
fell, so in Christ we shall all rise ; and there are a
hundred other expressions that all point to much
more direct and real influence of Our Lord on every
soul than we commonly suppose.

CHAPTER XIII

THE AIM OF HYPOSTATIC UNION

The presence of the Second Person of the Godhead in
the individual human nature is essentially, though
not exclusively, dynamic ; it is essentially a power
that elevates the assumed individual human nature.

It is perhaps a theological view of which it may
be said that it has become slightly obscured even
amongst Catholic theologians of the latter days ;
but there is no doubt as to the position which this
view holds in the Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
It is a very refreshing view, and one that may be
called most appropriately, as I said, the dynamic
view of Hypostatic Union.

In more recent theological works the view
taken of the presence of the Divinity in the individual
human nature is exclusively what I might call
the static view. Theologians accept the fact
of the Hypostatic Union, of the presence of the
fulness of Godhead in Christ's Humanity, and there
they remain. From such presence they all con-
clude the infinite moral dignity of Christ. A

86 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

human nature that bears within itself the fulness
of Godhead, that is united hypostatically with the
Second Person of the Trinity, shares in the infinitude
of sanctity and dignity proper to Godhead itself.
They say, for instance, that Christ's sufferings had
infinite atoning power because they were the
sufferings of a human organism hypostatically
united to Godhead. But beyond that communi-
cation of infinitude of moral worth, the more recent
theologies know little of an influence of the Divine
Person on the human nature in Christ ; their view
of the Hypostatic Union, as I said, is exclusively a
static view.

The two terms ' static ' and ' dynamic - are not
contradictory ; the same thing may be partly
static, partly dynamic; so I should say that the
view of St. Thomas is a combination of the static
and the dynamic. For him Hypostatic Union is
indeed the presence of the Divinity in an individual
human nature, but it is a presence full of activities,
full of vital influences ; it is more than a mere
communication of moral worth ; it is an elevation
of all the vital powers of Christ's Humanity, natural
and supernatural.

This is merely another view, another statement,
of his beloved expression that Christ's Humanity
is in all things instrumentum conjunctum Divinitatis.
Divinity, through Hypostatic Union, through that
intimacy of presence implied in Hypostatic Union,

THE AIM OF HYPOSTATIC UNION 87

has become the master of that Humanity in a way
that is not possible outside Hypostatic Union, and,
owing to that complete and wonderful mastery,
God does in Christ works of the spiritual order,
which it would not be possible for any created
nature to be the agent of, unless that nature were
hypostatically united with Divinity.

More simply I should state the matter thus :
Hypostatic Union is not a thing that exists for
its own sake, but it is the necessary means to raise
up an individual human nature to such a height
as to make it capable of doing the work of human
redemption and sanctification. In Hypostatic
Union God has shown forth His power, because He
has raised up a human nature to such a height as
to make it capable of the whole work of redemption
and sanctification. Christ's human soul and human
body, through being united hypostatically with the
Second Person of the Trinity, has acquired un-
paralleled fitness to be in the hands of God the
instrument of every spiritual marvel — a fitness
which a human nature could never possess outside
Hypostatic Union. No amount of sanctifying grace
could give such fitness, and it may be said that this
fitness is precisely the whole aim of Hypostatic
Union.

It is easy to see how the older view, which I call
in modern phraseology the dynamic view of Hypo-
static Union, considerably affects Christian piety.

88 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

The human being we love under the name of Jesus
is the main object in the whole of our Christ ology.
It is that human being that atones for our sins ; it is
that human being that directly forgives our sins ; it
is that human being that directly raises from their
corruption those that are spiritually and physically
dead ; it is that human being that directly is the
Father of the whole spiritual world to come. How
can a man do these things ? is the old objection. No
man can do it, is the answer, unless he be hyposta-
tically united with God ; but being once hypostatic-
ally united with Divinity, man has a native fitness
to do all those things. He does them in virtue of His
Divinity, it is true ; but it would be wrong to think
that by this expression, ' in virtue of His Divinity/
is meant an exclusively divine action, in the sense
that the God who dwells in Christ does it. No, it is
that human being called Jesus who does it, and He
has become capable of doing it simply because He
is hypostatically united with Godhead ; without
such union He could never do such works.

The merely static view of the presence of
Divinity in Christ through Hypostatic Union might
easily lead to a concept of Christ's Personality
that accentuates the duality of natures in Him
at the expense of the union of the two natures.
With all due reverence, might I be allowed to say
that there is a danger of our thinking of Christ in
layers, with the consequent feeling of unreality?

THE AIM OF HYPOSTATIC UNION 89

The older theology was as firm a believer in the
differences of the two natures in Christ, the divine
and the human ; but the two natures for the older
theology are not two separate layers of life in
Christ's Personality ; there is a most intimate
compenetration of activities between the two
natures, the divine nature using the human nature
as its instrumentum conjunctum, as my brain uses
my arm and my hand, according to the favourite
simile of St. Thomas.

The identification of the two natures and their
confusion into one entity is the old Eutychian
heresy, the most subtle aberration of man trying
to understand the psychology of Christ. St.
Thomas has shown how it is possible to conceive
a compenetration of the two natures that is not a
confusion — the compenetration of mutual activities.

The Son of Man stands before us in the fulness
of Divine Power ; and Divinity, far from diminishing
His manhood, has given that Humanity undreamed
of powers and possibilities that will make every
human heart in this world and in the next find
shelter in Him as the birds of the air find shelter
in the mighty tree that springs up from the mustard
seed.

CHAPTER XIV

THE TWO WILLS AND THE TWO OPERATIONS
IN CHRIST

A study of the theological controversies of the
early church-periods reveals a different temper
from the temper of the controversies of a later
date. Christians were evidently deeply interested
in Christ's Personality and in Christ's psychology — I
might almost say in Christ's intimate life. Perhaps
it is more congenial to the Eastern mind to analyse
its God than to analyse itself. Western doctrinal
upheavals have always been more or less about
practical things, about good works, about sanctity,
about sacraments. We are indebted, however, to
the East and its theologians for that most perfect
Christology which is the Church's greatest treasure.
Controversies about the two wills and the
two operations in Christ were the last stages of
the great theological battle ; the sixth and seventh
centuries are full of them, both ecclesiastically
and politically. Monothelitism is the received
name for the wrong standpoint in that matter ;

TWO WILLS AND TWO OPERATIONS 91

it means oneness of will, whilst the Church decided
for a duality of wills and a duality of operations
in Christ.

The Council of Ephesus had defined the oneness
of person in Christ ; the Council of Chalcedon had
defined the duality of natures in Christ. Christ
has a divine nature and a human nature in one
personality. That new doubts should have sprung
up is comprehensible enough ; Christ's will was
always one with His Father's will, Christ's actions
were always in obedience to His Father's com-
mands ; so it would seem that, in spite of the duality
of nature, there was oneness of will and oneness
of operation. The error was a subtle one, and no
doubt the holiest men might be deceived. After
all, oneness with God's will is highest sanctity.
The Latin Church, whose theology prevailed in
the long run, considered that oneness of will and
oneness of operation would be a partial renewing
of the older heresy of Eutyches. Will and operation
are nature's best jewels ; if they are one only
in Christ and not two, duality of nature is of little
avail ; so there is in Christ the divine will and the
human will, the divine operation and the human
operation.

This much for the historical and dogmatic
stating of the question. But duality of will and
operation in Christ is a point of theology full of
interest to those to whom the Christ-psychology is

92 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST'

the most entrancing psychology. The Eastern
mind that fell into Monothelitism overlooked a
distinction which many other minds have over-
looked : the distinction between the will as a power
and the will as an object. There can never be
identification of powers, but there may be identifica-
tion of objects. When I say that my will and
somebody's will are one, I mean to say that we
strive after the same object, that we love the same
object, that we agree about the same object ; so
in Christ there never was, and there never could
be, two wills — in the sense of two conflicting and
contradictory objects ; whatever was willed by
Divinity was also willed by humanity. Such an
identification of will is a perfection ; fusion of wills
as powers would be, on the contrary, a great loss ;
it would be, in fact, the destruction of nature.

But there is one consideration which is of utmost
importance both in Christ's psychology and in
our own psychology : how far is that oneness of
object preserved in the reluctance of our will powers
when we have to do a hard thing which we know to
be God's will, or, more clearly, the object of God's
will. That there was such a reluctance in Christ
is evident from His prayer and agony in the garden,
related more explicitly by St. Luke and alluded to
by St. Matthew and St. Mark. ' My soul is sorrowful
even unto death.' 1

1 St. Mark xiv. 34.

TWO WILLS AND TWO OPERATIONS 93

That there was a tremendous struggle in Christ's
soul at that hour is evident from the sweat of
blood. Yet oneness of will with the Father's
will was part of Christ's unalterable sanctity.
The solution of this apparent contradiction lies in
the distinction between the higher human will and
the lower human will. The higher will is made
of reason, the lower will is made of sensations and
impressions. The two wills may follow different
lines — opposite lines even ; it is man's struggle;
which is not always a struggle between good and
evil, but is as frequently a struggle between the
higher good and the lower good. Now oneness
with the divine will is preserved through the
stability of the higher will, that it should carry
out its purpose even against the most stubborn
reluctance of the will of impression. Such was
Christ's oneness of will. ' Abba, Father, all things
are possible to Thee; remove this chalice from
me : but not what I will, but what Thou wilt.' 1
That duality of will which the Catholic Church
adopted as part of her Christology is really the
most beautiful trait in our theology of Christ,
because in it we find the glorification of human
freedom wonderfully combined with the oneness
of the divine purpose.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who is as great a believer
in the duality of wills and operations in Christ as

1 St. Mark xiv. 36.

94 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

any other theologian, has conceived another one-
ness of will besides the oneness of objects. I
quote him literally from the first article of the
nineteenth question, in the answer to the second
objection. ' Therefore the operation which is of the
human nature in Christ, as far as it is the instrument
of Divinity, is not different from the operation of the
Divinity ; for the salvation through which Christ's
humanity saves is not different from the salvation
through which His Divinity saves.'

In this sentence we have practically all that
oneness in Christ's life we want ; it is a deep concept
to say that there are not two savings in Christ,
one done by His Divinity and one done by His
humanity ; on the contrary, it is all one act, owing
to the wonderful instrumental elevation and influ-
ence, made so much of by St. Thomas.

No doubt, thoughts of that kind had been
floating in the Eastern mind. Salvation was God's
work, God's will, God's love ; it could not think
of a dual salvation. But it was reserved to a
Western genius to show how with a duality of wills
and powers there could be oneness of operation.

CHAPTER XV

Christ's knowledge

Our theology on Christ's knowledge is guided
completely by a twofold entirety in Christ — namely,
He is entirely human, and He is a principle of life
to the entirety of the human race.

The various classes of knowledge which theology
attributes to our Lord are as indispensable to this
twofold function of His as our nerves and sinews
are indispensable to us in order to make of our
body a healthy, active, agile body, whose very life
is a feeling of refreshing well-being.

At first sight the conclusions of theology in this
matter may seem arbitrary ; it might appear as if the
theologian had fallen into the trap that lies before
every theological idealistic hero-worshipper and
millennium dreamer : you simply make your hero
stand for every beautiful abstraction ; once in the
dreamland of sanctity, there is no more reason to
draw the line than there is in fairyland. A
mountain of gold is as easily imagined as a
house of gold. As Christ is the ideal, and must be
the ideal, we simply hang on Him all the spiritual

96 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

glories we can think of, and afterwards we call it
theology. Such, I say, might be the cautious attitude
even of a reverential mind towards a theologian's
wisdom. Is it anything else, says the critical reader,
than an ordinary instance of that love of accumula-
tion so noticeable in the hero-worshipper ?

Careful study of the argumentation of the
masters of sacred wisdom in that matter reveals a
quite different temper : it is not the temper of the
idealist, it is the temper of the psychologist. The
theology of our Lord's knowledge is analytic, not
synthetic ; if it postulates various classes of know-
ledge in our Lord, it postulates them as life-functions,
not as the ornaments of an infinitely privileged
nature. Theology simply says that without those
various kinds of knowledge Christ could never be
entirely human, that He could never be the life of
the entire human race.

So little indeed has the naive love of the hero-
worshipper for the accumulation of glories given the
tune in this matter, that this point has, on the con-
trary, acquired a kind of secondary celebrity in the
history of theology for a retractation of St. Thomas
based on psychological considerations. In his earlier
works St. Thomas had held the opinion that in Christ
there was no kind of acquired knowledge of the
experimental class. This view he retracts as being
contrary to a deeper understanding of the workings
of Christ's human nature.

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 97

Before proceeding, I must give the reader a
synoptic view of the various kinds of rational
knowledge of which Catholic theology speaks. The
classification is short, including only four members.
But it is a classification which is absolutely indis-
pensable to theology ; without it many of the
revealed truths would lack rational meaning.

First and highest is the divine knowledge, the
knowledge which God has of Himself and of every-
thing else besides. This is increated knowledge.

Then, coming to the rational creature, there is
the Blessed Vision of God, called technically
' beatific vision/ It is an entirely supernatural,
I might almost say an entirely miraculous, kind of
knowledge, granted only to the spirits perfect in
charity and having reached the goal of eternal
fixity in goodness. By means of this knowledge
a spirit, either human or angelic, is enabled to see
God in His own native splendour, and he is enabled
to see in God many things of which God is the origin,
and of which God has knowledge.

After that we come to spirit-knowledge properly
so-called. A pure spirit is created with the full
knowledge of all things that are equal to him,
or lower than himself, besides his having a partial
knowledge of beings higher than himself. This
knowledge does not depend, in its essentials, on
sanctity ; even a fallen spirit retains it. Such
knowledge is complete in the spirit's mind from

98 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

the first moment of his existence. No new ideas
come to the spirit, except by special grace. But
there may be new applications of the innate idea.
The spirit's perfection is such as to postulate that
initial fulness of wisdom.

The fourth kind of rational knowledge belongs
to the human spirit, in its state of union with the
body. It is the knowledge acquired by the mind
through the infinitely varied instrumentality of
the senses. It is the wonderful schooling through
the external world, with its ever new experiences
and surprises, not to speak of its great lessons
and possible discoveries.

I need not enter into all the divisions and
varieties that may be found within each of
the four categories. I mention, as it were, four
continents, four planes of intellectual activities ;
but I lay no claim to having said anything as to
the manifold wonders that may be hidden within
their boundaries.

Leaving alone the first kind of knowledge
mentioned, God's knowledge in Himself and of
Himself, and which is a divine and unchanging
act, the three other kinds of knowledge, created
knowledge, may vary endlessly in extent and
vividness according to the sanctity or perfection
of the individual, human or angelic. Moreover —
and this is a point of utmost importance in theo-
logical matters — the three kinds may be in the

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 99

same mind, at the same time, regarding the same
objects of knowledge. In other words, there is
no apparent contradiction in the assumption that
a human being may know all about another human
being, at the same time, in the vision of God, in
the angelic mode of knowledge, and in virtue of
sense observation. Each mode of knowing would
convey something which the other modes fail to
convey, and the more perfect mode would not
render useless the services of the less perfect mode,
because the less perfect mode represents many
times its object in a more congenital and more
proportionate way.

Daily experiences supply easy analogies. I may
know of some clever piece of mechanical skill from
a friend's description or from reading ; both the
book and the friend give me a very good idea of
the invention. After that I may go to the town
where it is on view and look at it myself. Though
I walk up to it with a very good image of it in
my brain, when I actually come to see it, my
store of experiences is the richer for the sight.
I may then begin a process of mental investigation ;
I try to fathom the principle of the invention ;
I may succeed in following in my own mind the
road which the original inventor followed in his,
and I may be led to the same conclusions, and
arrive concerning that very thing at the knowledge
which its maker had before he carried his thoughts

H 2

ioo THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

into execution. Here we have three different
modes of knowing the same object ; far from
excluding or superseding each other, they help each
other towards a fuller comprehension of the little
wonder. This is of course a mere analogy to
illustrate a much higher train of thought : how,
for instance, there may be new intellectual grati-
fication to meet the thing that was seen in the
light of God's vision, as a reflection in a mirror,
outside God, in its own native individuality, through
another and lower mode of knowledge.

In Christ there are at the same time all the
aforesaid kinds of knowledge : there is the infinite,
the divine knowledge of the Godhead ; there is
the threefold created knowledge of beatific vision,
of angelic cognition, and of human experience and
ratiocination.

In our thoughts on the Incarnation there is
the constant danger of being overwhelmed by the
fact of Christ's Divinity, as if it were the all-
absorbing and all-effacing splendour of Christ's
wonderful Personality. But we ought to bear in
mind the great truth that Divinity was united
with humanity not so much for the sake of that
union, however adorable it may be, as for the
sake of the great human life such a union rendered
possible. So in this matter of knowledge, the
presence of the divine mind in Christ's person,
far from rendering superfluous the glories of the

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 101

human mind, has no other end in view than precisely
the perfection of that human mind. This is why
St. Thomas says that if in Christ's Person there
had been divine knowledge only, Christ's soul
would have been in the dark, and its being united
with the Godhead would have been a useless
privilege. Hypostatic Union took place in order
to cause in Christ's human soul such bliss, such
lights, as to make of it in its turn the direct source
and cause of all the bliss and all the light that will
flood the minds of the elect, in the clear vision of
God, for all eternity. It would not seem as if such
a height and such a power of beatific vision as
to make it the efficient cause of all other beatific
visions, in ordinary human minds, were at all
possible unless Divine Personality, which is the
Wisdom of God the Father, were united with that
created mind. Unless Christ had been endowed
with beatific vision He could not have been happy
in Himself ; He could not have become to us the
efficient cause of our own vision of God ; He could
not have possessed that double entirety of glorified
humanity that makes Him what He is.

This same principle of Christ's entirety makes
it imperative on the theologian to ascribe to Him
a most complete and a most far-reaching intellectual
knowledge, which cannot have its origin in the
experiences of sense, and which at the same time
is not beatific vision. Christ's human mind must

ios THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

have been fully developed, must have possessed
every kind of perfection a created intellect may
possess, independently, so to speak, of the gift of
God's vision, simply because it is the intellect
of a man who has the double privilege of being
God-man in Himself, and the King of the human
race for ever, and, by a kind of extension, the King
of the whole spirit-race. The whole created in-
tellectual world is at His feet, because in Him the
human intellect has acquired unparalleled perfec-
tion through the proximity of the Godhead.

It was precisely this incontrovertible fulness of
intellectuality that made it seem doubtful whether
there was any room for the workings of the ordinary
human mind in Christ. Why should one so full
of direct intellectual perceptions learn from the
store-house of sense observations ? St. Thomas
himself was impressed by such considerations, as I
have said already. But St. Thomas learned what
we all learn when Christ is the habitual subject
of our thoughts : the necessity of keeping Him as
human as possible, in spite of the sublimities of
the Hypostatic Union, and even, perhaps, on
account of those very sublimities.

That Christ's human intellect should be filled
with pure spirit-knowledge of all things belongs to
the entirety of His representative role, embodying
in Himself the whole human nature. But He would
not have been in Himself an entirely human being if

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 103

He had not acted and learned precisely like a human
being. Christ's human brain is the most powerful,
the most active that ever was. The attribute of
genius belongs to Christ more than to any other
historical personage. He may be called the greatest
thinker, the greatest philosopher, without any im-
propriety of language. He possesses in the most
eminent degree what makes the really great amongst
men so powerful — a serene, wonderfully penetrating
mind at the service of a will of infinite resolve
and considerateness. The higher kind of know-
ledge only comes in as a kind of reserve when the
organic brain of Christ — for such is the expression
best suited to render the theology of St. Thomas
in this matter — has done all it could do in virtue
of its own superhuman excellency. How far a
created human brain under the elevating influence
of Hypostatic Union can go in its potentialities
is of course a matter for admiring reverence rather
than for dogmatic diagnosis. St. Thomas in the
first article of the twelfth question simply says that
Christ knew through the sheer penetration of His
human brain-power all that can be known through
human induction and deduction. Such are not his
words ; but such is his meaning. In Christ the
human mind attains its ideal perfection and power.
The process of deduction and induction in Christ's
mind was a progressive process, not an instantaneous
one, as Christ's brain reached its maturity not

104 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

instantaneously but progressively. He learned as
He grew up. ' And Jesus advanced in wisdom and
age, and grace with God and man.' l

It is a principle admitted universally that Christ,
through the combined clarities of the three sorts
of created knowledge here described, knows every-
thing that concerns the human race. The whole of
mankind's nature with its life and free will is reflected
in Christ's mind as in a mirror. St. Thomas thinks
that such knowledge constitutes actually an infinity
of knowledge, as the free acts of the human indi-
viduals go on for all eternity. Such special and
determined kind of infinitude is not above the grasp
of a finite intellect, as it is infinitude in one direction
only, not infinitude all round. What Catholic theo-
logy is at pains to show is that complete mastery of
mankind by the Son of man through which our
race is deified.

The theology on Christ's knowledge has received
a strange actuality in our own days from unexpected
quarters. Protestant theologians are at a loss
how to explain Christ's abasement. This most
vexed question is called the Kenotic question : How
did Christ ' empty ' Himself ? More than one
Anglican theologian explains Kenosis through de-
ficiency in knowledge. Christ is supposed to have
been lacking in knowledge in order to humble
Himself, or anyhow to have turned away from

1 St. Luke ii. 52,

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 105

knowledge — to have shut His eyes for a time to the
things which He knew.

Catholic theology is as great a believer in Christ's
abasement as any other theology, but it never felt
the need of curtailing Christ's spiritual and in-
tellectual privileges in order to make of Him ' a
high Priest who can have compassion on our infir-
mities.' Fulness of knowledge, on the contrary,
makes of Christ the High Priest. To make of the
absence of knowledge a means of sanctity is a
theological trick peculiarly distasteful to the
Catholic mind ; above all, one cannot see how the
Son of God made man could have gained anything
by willingly ignoring the facts of His Divine Son-
ship. Even if it had been possible for Him to
exclude such knowledge from His mind, it would
have been loss, not gain, to His cause, as His life
must necessarily have been lowered through this
very forgetfulness of His divine origin. It is a
very strange phase of thought in our own days to
look for moral progress to ignorance instead of to
knowledge, as does the older theology.

There is only one way in which Catholic
theology admits a kind of voluntary limitation
of His knowledge by Christ. Catholic theology
distinguishes between actual and habitual know-
ledge. I may know a thing and yet not consider
it actually ; I may even make an effort of will and
turn away my mind from the actual consideration

106 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

of an object, and in this sense it may even be
profitable to sanctity ' to ignore/ Thus if I am
asked to perform an act of kindness which is difficult
to me, there might be human considerations of an
inferior order of such a nature as to reconcile me with
the performance of my duty. Such considerations
I discard ; I turn away my eyes from them ; I fix
my mind on higher motives, less alluring and less
potent, but infinitely purer. In this case my
spirituality has gained through a restriction of
actual knowledge.

In Christ there was likewise actual knowledge
and habitual knowledge, at least in the inferior
planes of His science ; but Catholic theology is
most constant in asserting that Christ realised His
Divinity constantly, unceasingly, with His whole
being ; but it is not against Catholic theology
to say that Christ in the lower sphere of His
knowing powers did not always consider actually
all the things He knew. We are even permitted
to think that Christ in His great struggle with sin,
of set purpose, turned His human attention away,
at times at least, from the glorious vision of the
results of His cross in the world of souls, in order
that He might drink the cup of bitterness with more
heroic constancy. In this sense we may grant
that Kenosis has something to do with knowledge.
It is not exactly ignorance, but rather an absence
of consideration. It is perhaps that very thing

CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE 107

which Anglican divines are striving after when
they attempt to make of ignorance in the Son of
God an occasion of greater heroism. We may
grant to them that our Lord at various periods,
of set purpose, turned away His human attention
from considerations that would have filled Him
with gladness if He had allowed them to force
themselves on His mind.

CHAPTER XVI

IN CHRIST

The phrase ' in Christ ' occurs nearly eighty times
in St. Paul's epistles ; frequently it is translated
into * by,' ' through/ ' for the sake of ' Christ. Yet
such alterations ought not to deprive us of the
wealth of mystical meaning contained in the original
phrase ' in Christ.' We have a right to the literal
application of the Pauline expression. To alter
it into anything less emphatic is to tamper with
our spiritual inheritance.

Let us first dwell on the deep originality of the
phrase, on its strangeness, if we compare it with
ordinary human speech. No doubt it is this very
strangeness that may have led the translators to
the adoption of less significant prepositions to
take the place of the ' in.'

One could hardly think of a phrase, say in
English, or German, or French, or Italian, or Latin,
or Greek — a phrase destined to express some one's
influence on some one else, with the intervention
and co-operation of a third person, where the

IN CHRIST 109

preposition ' in ' would be aptly employed to
convey the mode of that third person's intervention
or co-operation. I may feel most anxious about
the moral conduct of a favourite brother of mine.
No concern in the world is nearer to my heart than
his salvation from ruin. There is one redeeming
point in him. He is fond of our common sister,
a paragon of virtue and love. In her is all my
hope. Both for my sake and her own she follows
the scapegrace, she wins him back through her
masterful delicacy. No words could describe what
my gratitude to her really is. I feel that she has
made this salvation possible ; yet my speech would
be foolish if I said that I saved my brother ' in '
her. I saved him through her, I say, and more I
could not say.

Yet St. Paul prefers the first form of speech.
God saves me not through His Son, but in His
Son. It is not merely an idiosyncrasy of St. Paul's
style — in fact, the idiosyncrasy would hardly be
short of a barbarism — it is a necessity of St. Paul's
theology. Let us take as an instance St. Paul's
magnificent passage in the second chapter of the
Epistle to the Ephesians. I keep the prepositions
as they are in the Greek text. ' But God who is
rich in mercy, for his exceeding charity wherewith
he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath
quickened us together in Christ, by whose grace
you are saved ; and hath raised us up together,

no THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

and hath made us sit together in the heavenly
places in Christ Jesus, that he might show in
the ages to come the abundant riches of his
grace, in his bounty towards us in Christ Jesus.
. . . For we are his workmanship created in Christ
Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that
we should walk in them.'

The most remarkable association of words in
this most remarkable passage is the verse : ' And
he hath made us sit together in the heavenly
places in Christ Jesus.' The Douai translator
for one found the reduplication of the ' in ' too
much for him, and he calmly translates ' in the
heavenly places through Christ.' In fact, in
ordinary grammar the phrase would sound ludic-
rous ; but nowhere do we find St. Paul guilty
of a careless use of prepositions. He distinguishes
carefully between the preposition of instrument-
ality and the preposition that marks inclusion.
Note, for instance, his phrase : x ' For if you
have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet
not many fathers. For in Christ Jesus by
the Gospel I have begotten you.' The Greek
and the Latin discriminate clearly between the
two propositions. The constant use of the un-
wonted term ' in ' simply points to a spiritual
truth, clearly perceived by St. Paul, and for which
no doubt there is no received phraseology in

1 i Cor. iv, 15.

IN CHRIST in

the ordinary language. Christ's co-operation with
God in the sanctification of the elect is expressed
almost invariably by St. Paul, not as an action
of God through Him, but as an action of God
in Him. ' For God indeed was in Christ recon-
ciling the world to himself.' 1 The action of God
is confined within Christ's Personality, and making
Him what He is, is God's way of saving and
sanctifying the human race. ' In whom all the
building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy
temple in the Lord.' *

1 2 Cor, v, 19. a Eph. ii. 21.

CHAPTER XVII

CHRIST ALL IN ALL

Intellectual and philosophical ages are the
high-water mark of human progress. They come
and go with their blessings and dangers, as all
the other manifestations of the activities of pro-
gressive humanity come and go, according to
unknown rules, almost with the regularity of the
ocean tides.

One of the blessings of a philosophical age
is of course the love for the - universal,' for what
is beyond the narrow limits of time and space.
An unphilosophical, a positive and materialistic
age has no love except for the particular fact,
the thing that has avoirdupois and the thing that
can be measured by an equivalent in hard cash.
But this very love for the universal, which is
the trait of a thinking generation, has its dangers :
it leads to various forms of thought, to various
' isms ' — the expression has become common
enough to be used without an air of pretence —
before which there stands the dangerous Greek
prefix ' pan.'

CHRIST ALL IN ALL 113

Pantheism, for one thing, is the most common
intellectual sin in a philosophical age. The philo-
sophical temper likes oneness in all things. We
are all one God, we are all one Mind, we are all
one Spirit, says the philosophical mind that has
the defects of its qualities, an excessive love for
the universal.

May I be forgiven for coining an expression
that represents a good deal of undefined thinking
and feeling in our times — times in which the drift of
human evolution sets in the direction of philosophical
thought. May I be permitted to speak of ' pan-
christism.' We are all Christ's, we are all instances
of the Incarnation ; we are all sons of God ; there
is a Christ within us all, etc. Phrases of similar
import are as common in the writings and speeches
of religious men of our own days as the criticisms
of the day's weather are common in daily social
intercourse.

The aberration is the defect of a great quality,
the shadow cast by a great light : men are reluctant
to make of a person quite outside themselves
the principle of their higher life, though that person
be of surpassing excellency. The very fact of
' outsideness ' puts even the very personification of
human excellency at a disadvantage, with regard
to our own intimate life, if that personification
be a concrete individual. At bottom, all pan-
theistic and all ' pan-christic ' tendencies come

1

H4 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

from this deep-rooted aversion of the spiritually
minded to make of an isolated individuality the
principle of one's most intimate life.

Against pantheism Christianity has the
indwelling of the Holy Ghost, that great spiritual
fact which brings man nearer to God than pantheism
itself, as through it man is not only near God but
above himself — above the potentialities of the plane
of his own nature, an elevation quite unthinkable
in the metaphysics of ordinary pantheism, where
man is divine through the laws of his own spirit,
and where therefore, logically, ascent is impossible,
as man already is part of the Deity. If Christianity
had no such spiritual fact as the indwelling of
the Holy Ghost in the human soul, its fight with
pantheism would have a poor outlook. Modern
pan-christism is born from a narrowing of Christ's
spiritual position. Let us give Christ the position
of traditional Catholic theology, and we shall find
in Him the life-giving principle of what is highest
in us ; we shall find Him at the very root of our
being, and yet we shall not feel tempted to break
down the barriers of His wonderful individuality,
with a view to making Him less personal and more
communicable to us. One thing I may note here.
Pan-christism is a modern form of aberration.
It comes from a lingering faith in, and love for,
Christ, unsustained by deep Christology.

Our theology of Christ is not like a tale with a

CHRIST ALL IN ALL 115

purpose, written just with a view to refute or
redress or silence an error. Catholic and scholastic
Christology received its completion long before
the tendencies I call pan-christism. Yet such as
Catholic Christianity is to-day, it is to pan-christism
what the indwelling of the Holy Ghost is to
pantheism — its cure, its refutation, and, above all,
its higher and healthier substitute.

A literal interpretation of many of Christ's utter-
ances points decidedly to the universal relationship
of His person with the human race.

' Father, the hour is come ; glorify the Son,
that thy Son may glorify thee : as thou hast given
him power over all flesh, that he may give eternal
life to all whom thou hast given him.' *

' My Father worketh until now, and I work.
Hereupon therefore the Jews sought the more to
kill him, because he did not only break the sabbath,
but also said God was his Father, making himself
equal to God. Then Jesus answered and said to
them, Amen, Amen, I say unto you, The Son
cannot do anything of himself, but what he seeth
the Father doing ; for what things soever he doth,
them the Son also doth in like manner. For the
Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things
which himself doth, and greater works than these
will he shew him, that you may wonder. For as
the Father raiseth up the dead, and giveth life ;

1 St. John xvii. i, 2.

I 2

n6 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

so also the Son giveth life to whom he will. For
neither doth the Father judge any man, but
hath given all judgment to the Son : that all men
may honour the Son, as they honour the Father.
He who honoureth not the Son honoureth not
the Father who hath sent him. . . . For as the
Father hath life in himself, so he hath given to the
Son also to have life in himself : and he hath given
him power to do judgment, because he is the Son
of man/ *

■ Now this is the will of my Father that sent me,
that every one who seeth the Son, and believeth
in him, may have life everlasting, and I will raise
him up in the last day. . . . The bread that I
will give is my flesh for the life of the
World/ *

It would be easy to multiply quotations that
would establish beyond doubt the fact that Christ
constantly attributes to Himself not only a univers-
ality of relationship with the human race, but a
relationship of life, a relationship of light, He being
to all men of good will what is most subjective
in man, spiritual life and spiritual light.

This filling up of creation by Christ is a cherished
idea with St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians.
' He [God] hath subjected all things under his
[Christ's] feet : and hath made him head over all
the Church, which is his body, and the fulness of
1 St. John v, 17 seqt * St. John vi, 40, 31,

CHRIST ALL IN ALL 117

him, who is filled all in all.' * ' To know also the
charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge,
that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God.' a
' He [Christ] that descended is the same also that
ascended above all the heavens, that he might
fill all things. . . . Until we all meet into the unity
of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of
the fulness of Christ.' 8

This idea of fulness stands for the greatest
spiritual facts in the New Testament. ' And of
his fulness we all have received, and grace for grace.'4
1 For in him [Christ] dwelleth the fulness of the
Godhead corporally.' 6 Consummate sanctity is to
be filled with the Holy Ghost in the language of
the New Testament.

When therefore we see Christ spoken of so
insistently as a filling up of the capacities of the
spiritual world, we are confronted by a spiritual
fact of the highest importance — a fact as great
as the filling up of the human heart by the Holy
Ghost, a fact that is the parallel of that fulness
of the indwelling of Divinity in Christ Himself.
If there is the indwelling of the Spirit of God in
man, there is also the indwelling of Christ in man's
heart. ' That Christ may dwell by faith in your
hearts ' 8 is a saying as pregnant with the realities

1 Eph. i, 22, 23. a Eph, iii, io, » Eph. iv. 10, 13.

* St. John i, 1 5. • Col. ii, 9. • Eph. iii. 17.

n8 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

of true spiritual immanence as that other phrase :
1 Know you not that you are the temple of God, and
that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you ? ' ■

There is nothing left that a mystical lover of
Christ could desire in the way of oneness with Him
than that such phraseology should be taken literally.
Christ's lover may not possess the theological
training that enables the mind to conceive psychic
possibilities of such a nature as will make the
literal interpretation of the texts the most obvious
interpretation ; but his spiritual instinct will all
be in favour of as intimate an indwelling of Christ
in the human race as possible. The idea of the
■ fulness ' is for his mystical powers ; the idea of
the instrumentum conjunctum Divinitatis is for his
reasoning powers. The two ideas complete each
other.

' As thou hast sent me into the world, I also
have sent them into the world. And for them
do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sancti-
fied in truth. And not for them only do I pray,
but for them also who through their word shall
believe in me ; that they all may be one, as thou
Father, in me, and I in thee, that they also may
be one in us : that the world may believe that thou
hast sent me. And the glory which thou hast
given me I have given to them ; that they may
be one, as we also are one ; I in them, and thou

1 I Cor, iii, 16,

CHRIST ALL IN ALL 119

in me, that they may be made perfect in one :
and the world may know that thou hast sent me.

' As thou hast sent me into the world, I also have
sent them into the world.' x

The Pauline idea of God's merciful operations
taking place within Christ's personality, deep
as it is, is not deeper than the Johannine view
expressed in this passage. St. John states most
unequivocally the doctrine of our being Christ's
fulness, the doctrine of the pleroma ; for such is the
Greek for it.

I do not think that we could find anywhere in
the scriptures words more pregnant with mystical
significance of the highest order, and words more
illuminating as to the real meaning of our being
sanctified in Christ, and our being the ' filling up '
the pleroma of Christ.

In the Epistle to the Colossians chapter ii.,
we find St. Paul making the same juxtaposition of
that double presence in Christ, the presence of God
and the presence in Him of the Elect. ' For
in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead,
corporally ; and you are filled in him, who is the
head of all principality and power.' ' I in them,
and thou in me'; such is the double filling up
constituted by the mystery of the Incarnation.

The pleroma is essentially a glory that is
inside Christ, not outside Him. The first chapter

1 St, John xvii. 18, seq.

120 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

to the Colossians makes this perfectly clear.
After saying that Christ is the image of the
unseen God, that all the heavenly powers are
created in Him, are kept together in Him, that He
is the head of the Church, the Apostle says,' Because
in him it has well pleased (the father) that all fulness
should dwell.' This indwelling of the pleroma in
Him is the reason of the Divine, Angelic, and
Church orders being united in Him. Christ there-
fore has a threefold pleroma, and all three dwell
within Him.

The second and third, the Church pleroma,
interact, i.e. Christ's fills up the angelic world
and the Church, and He is filled up by them.
His dwelling in a created spirit is the created
spirit's dwelling in Him. ' He that eateth my
flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I
in him. As the living father hath sent me, and I
live by the father ; so he that eateth me, the same
also shall live by me.' *

This mutuality of indwelling between Christ
and His elect is clearly a New Testament idea.

In Eph. i. 23 Christ is said to be filled up all in
all, passively. In Eph. iv. 10 Christ is said actively
to fill up all things. Finally, in Col. ii. 10 the
faithful are said to be filled up in Him, passively.
In the light of that mutuality of indwelling, so
clearly stated in St. John's Gospel, these various

1 St. John vi, 56, 57,

CHRIST ALL IN ALL 121

modes of speech easily point to the same spiritual
reality, a great compenetration between Christ
and the Elect. :

Another parallelism worth remarking is found
in St. Paul's expression in 1 Cor. xv. 28, where he
describes the consummation of all things after
the Resurrection, when God will be all things
in all. ' That God may be all in all.' Now this
phrase ' all in all ' is used with regard to Christ as
a predicate in Eph. i. 23 ; only instead of saying
that Christ is all in all, St. Paul says that He is
filled all in all.

' And when all things shall be subjected unto
him [Christ], then the Son also himself shall be
subjected unto him that put all things under him,
that God may be all in all.1 This is the formula
for the true pantheism of Christianity. ' And he
[the Father] hath subjected all things under
his feet, and hath made him head over all the
church, which is his body, and the fulness of him
who is filled all in all.' 2 This is our true and most
consoling pan-christism.

1 1 Gor, xv. 28. P Eph, i, 22, 23.

CHAPTER XVIII

Christ's reserves

It may be a practical difficulty to many minds to
find happiness in that hierarchy of sublimities that
constitute the God-man, as such a hierarchy with its
division of glories and attributes may not be con-
ducive to love ; yet the mystery of Christ ought
to be the sweetest of all mysteries. It has therefore
occurred to me that the hierarchical gradation of
sanctities and glories in Christ could be best
expressed through the English word ' reserve ' ;
they are so many reserves of graces and glories that
make Christ's Personality so intensely attractive.

When we are in contact with people whom we
believe to be possessed of high moral or intel-
lectual qualities, who have done brave deeds or
said wise things, the daily ordinary intercourse
with them has wonderful charm, owing to our
impression that there is a great reserve of
superior power in them. Most of our intercourse
is of the ordinary character, yet all along we feel
that there is something higher, and this latent

CHRIST'S RESERVES 123

conviction lends additional charm to the daily
urbanities.

This is the kind of simile I would fain propose
to those that approach the Son of God. He is
the Son of man. He is a perfect man ; you will
find in Him all the charms of perfect humanity.
Go deep into that humanity and love it tenderly;
very soon you will find that behind the humanity
there is a wonderful reserve of grace that is more
than human. You feel its presence, though it
may not act directly ; but there is such a majesty
in that humanity as to make it clear that the
humanity is passing into something more than
human. If that superhuman element is approached,
there again it is such as to point to a tremendous
reserve behind it. There is the Divine Personality
deeply concealed underneath the created glories
and graces, and lending them that infinitude of
vista and possibility which it is so refreshing for
the created spirit to catch a glimpse of. Christ's
glorious finitudes sweetly and gradually are merged
into the infinitudes of His Divine Personality.
We enter into Him as man, His humanity is the
door, we go out of His Humanity into His angelic
life, into His divine life, and our mind finds indeed
its pasture in Him. ' I am the door : by me if any
man enter in, he shall be saved, he shall go in and
go out, and shall find pastures/ 1
1 St, John X. 9,

124 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Nothing could be more refreshing than to read
St. John's Gospel in the light of this idea of reserve.
The Jewish mind is puzzled, is irritated with this
wonderful personality of Christ. They cannot
make him out ; they quarrel amongst themselves
about Him ; they feel, in spite of themselves, that
there is something extraordinary behind His human
appearance. It is not only His miracles that are
extraordinary, His whole personality is an enigma.
His enemies, in true Jewish fashion, have a ready
explanation for this incomprehensible masterful-
ness of the hated Rabbi. He has within Himself an
evil spirit. ■ The Jews therefore answered and
said to him, Do we not say well that thou art a
Samaritan, and hast a devil ? . . . Now we know
that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the
prophets ; and thou say est, If any man keep my word
he shall not taste death for ever. Art thou greater
than our Father Abraham, who is dead ?' x

But a dissension arose again among the Jews for
these words, 'And many of them said, He has a
devil, and is mad ; why hear you him ? Others said,
These are not the words of one who hath a devil.
Can a devil open the eyes of the blind ? ' 2

The Gospel of St. John is in fact full of asser-
tions on Christ's part as to the presence in Him
of glories that do not appear to the eye. ' Amen,
Amen, I say to thee that we speak what we know,

1 St. John viii, 48-53. 2 St. John x, 19-21.

CHRIST'S RESERVES 125

and we testify what we have seen ; and you receive
not our testimony. If I had spoken to you earthly
things, and you believed not, how will you believe
if I shall speak to you heavenly things, and no man
has ascended into heaven but he that descendeth
from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.'1

It might be said without exaggeration that the
whole trend of Christ's discourses, as well as the
Baptist's testimony in the fourth Gospel, is this :
there is more in this man than appears to the eye ;
even His miracles, great as they are, do not give the
measure of His greatness ; but they entitle Him to
be listened to even when He says that He and the
Father are one. Quotations to that effect could
be multiplied so as to make of the chapter a kind
of resume of St. John's Gospel. A few more must
suffice. ' And it was the feast of the dedication at
Jerusalem, and it was winter. And Jesus walked
in the Temple in Solomon's porch. The Jews there-
fore came round about Him, and said to Him, How
long dost thou hold our souls in suspense ? If thou
be the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them,
I speak to you, and you believe not ; the works that
I do in the name of My Father, they give testimony
of me. . . .

1 1 and the Father are one. The Jews then
took up stones to stone Him. Jesus answered
them : Many good works I have shewn you from

1 St. John iii, 11-13,

126 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

my Father ; for which of those works do you stone
me ? The Jews answered Him, For a good
work we stone thee not, but for the blasphemy ;
and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself
God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in
your law, I said, You are gods ? If he called them
gods, to whom the word of God was spoken (and
the scripture cannot be broken), do you say of
him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent
into the world, Thou blasphemest ; because I
said I am the Son of God ? If I do not the works
of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though
you will not believe me, believe the works ; that
you may know, and believe, that the Father is
in me, and I in the Father. They sought there-
fore to take him, and he escaped out of their hands.'
One cannot resist quoting once more. From
the fierce antagonism of the Pharisee let us come
to the good-natured perplexity of the disciples
themselves, of Philip, the ingenious questioner
in the Gospel, and let us hear the divine answer
given with wonderful playfulness. ' If you had
known me, you would without doubt have known
my Father also ; and from henceforth you shall
know him, and you have seen him. Philip saith
to him : Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough
for us. Jesus saith to him : So long a time have
I been with you, and have you not known me ?
Philip, he that seeth me, seeth the Father also

CHRIST'S RESERVES 127

How sayest thou, Shew us the Father ? Do you
not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father
in me ? The words that I speak to you I speak
not of myself : but the Father who abideth in
me, he doth the works. Believe you not that I
am in the Father, and the Father in me?'

CHAPTER XIX

THE HIDING OF CHRIST'S GODHEAD

In our chapter entitled ' Reserve ' we have tried
to give of Christ's complex Personality such a
view as to make contemplation of Him a sweet
and gradual ascent from winsomeness unto
winsomeness within that human nature in which,
according to St. Paul, Godhead had taken up
a bodily abode. ' For in him dwelleth all the
fulness of the Godhead, corporally.' *

There is one theological truth which is of im-
portance, if we are to relish the mystery of Christ,
and the truth is this : Though Christ's Person-
ality be an ever-ascending succession of spiritual
sublimities, there was during His mortal life a check
put on those sublimities by God's omnipotence, lest
through the presence in Christ's soul of such
marvellous vitalities, Christ's soul should not be
a sharer in our common state of mortality.

St. Thomas, always so reluctant to admit
exceptional interposition of God's providence, is

1 Col. ii. 9.

THE HIDING OF CHRIST'S GODHEAD 129

compelled to confess that God prevented the
higher graces in the soul of Christ, such as Beatific
Vision, from making themselves felt within Christ's
soul according to their full possibilities.

It is evident that the presence of such a gift
as the clear vision of God within a human spirit
by ordinary law ought to dispel any cloud of
sadness from that spirit. To see God face to
face as Christ saw Him is a happiness so intense
as to raise the subject's soul and body above
the sphere of sorrow and suffering.

Yet Christ was sorrowful in the deepest and
holiest regions of His soul. He suffered in His
body, He suffered in every one of His mental
faculties. We are therefore to admit a psycho-
logical miracle in Christ, the only psychological
miracle within Him known to theology. It is
a miracle of wonderful subtlety, showing clearly
what possibilities there must be in the human
soul. Beatific Vision and the other spiritual
sublimities were all there, in full activity ; all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge were within
His intellect. ' In whom are hid all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge.' *

And yet by a direct intervention of God, as St.

Thomas says, they did not flow over ; they were

kept back from certain regions of Christ's soul,

from certain powers of Christ's body, in order that

1 Col. ii. 3,

i3o THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Christ should have power to suffer and to merit,
to be sorrowful and to be fearful for the redeemed.

It was a psychological miracle because it was the
suspension of effects that should naturally have
followed, and I say that it is the only miracle in
Christ's Person ; His Person as such is not exactly
a miracle, it is a wonder, the greatest of all wonders ;
but it is not the suspension of any laws, it is, on the
contrary, the application of the highest laws of God's
power, whilst a miracle always implies a suspension
of a result that ought to be.

The modern rationalist may find it difficult to see
in the Jesus of Nazareth, who was obedient to His
parents, the Christ of St. Paul such as He is described
in the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians,
though, as a matter of history, the aforesaid Episties
were written before the Gospel of St. Luke. We
admit that without a direct miracle the Christ in
whom all the fulness was pleased to dwell, ' Because
in him it hath well pleased the Father that all
fulness should dwell,' could not have been the boy
who sat among the doctors at the age of twelve,
asking questions and receiving answers from them.
There was in Him another kind of reserve, taking
reserve now in its active meaning ; there was a
miraculous keeping back from certain regions of His
Personality of the glories of His Godhead.

This is what is meant by the constant theological
expression that Christ was at the same time cotnpre-

THE HIDING OF CHRIST'S GODHEAD 131

hensor and viator — that is to say, a seer of God and
a wayfarer, a pilgrim abroad and a guest in the
Father's house. ' And no man hath ascended into
heaven but he that descendeth from heaven, the
Son of man who is in heaven.' * He was at the
same time full of the eternal life and subject to the
agonies of human death ; the highest regions of His
soul were thrilled with the joys of the Blessed Vision,
and those same regions were saddened with the sight
of the world's iniquities ; for it would not be gener-
ous to think of our Lord's soul having happiness in
its highest faculties and sorrow merely in its lower
powers. His sorrow was a divine sorrow, as it
was sorrow for the creature's theological guilt ;
as such, it had to be in the noblest part of His soul,
where there was the thrill of Beatific Vision.

But such division of soul and spirit, such
blending of light and darkness, is a miracle, and, as
I have said, it is only the abnormal thing in Christ 's
Personality. The abnormality ceased when He gave
up His soul to the Father on the cross.

1 St, John iii. 13,

K 2

CHAPTER XX

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE

Christ's attitude towards physical and mental
suffering is of immense practical significance for
man's daily life, as well as for the progress of civili-
sation. We are far to-day from the times that
admired a nature ' red in tooth and claw/ and it
becomes a very pressing question on the Christian
theologian how the wonderful victories over physical
pain won by modern science are in line with the
gospel of the Cross.

I think it profitable to my patient reader to give
him an exhaustive rendering of the theological
teaching concerning Christ's attitude towards pain
and suffering. Morbidness, even in excelsis, is
unforgiveable, and it is perhaps all the more dele-
terious to healthy soul-life because it is stretched
into infinitude.

By Christ's body we mean of course the whole
extent of Christ's sensitive life, which, more than
any other human life, is a wonderful summary of all
that is beautiful in the physical world. No human

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE 133

intellect can fathom the possibilities of an organism
vivified and elevated by a soul so perfect as was
Christ's soul. That suffering and death should
enter into such an organism is a thought more
appalling than that sin should have been found in
the angels of God. It is only our familiarity with the
mystery of the Cross that makes us look on Christ's
sufferings as on an obvious natural phenomenon.

The wondering compassion of the saints who are
overawed and stirred in their souls with the thought
that God suffered is by no means a misplaced
sentiment. For Christ, in His Humanity, was
entitled, by all the laws of the Hypostatic Union,
to an absolutely divine immunity from pain and
suffering. Divinity itself could never be subject
to any kind of suffering whatsoever. It would
be the worst of all blasphemies to say that
God, in His own life, could experience any con-
trariety. No created gain could come from the
Creator's loss, as there is nothing so profitable to
the finite being as that infinitude should inhabit
the region of unassailable bliss, to which every
creature may tend as to the unalterable felicity.
With Divinity, suffering is an absolute contradiction
in terms, both from the point of view of God's life
and God's sanctity. A strong God, as well as a
holy God, is infinitely above every thinkable sort
of disappointment. Now this aloofness from sorrow
is Christ's natural condition from the very laws of

134 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Hypostatic Union. The divinity of Christ's person
is in itself such an exemption from the ordinary
laws of mortality that no exclamation of surprise
on the lips of the lover of Jesus at seeing Him suffer
and die can be too strong.

Theology starts with the assertion that Christ's
normal condition would have been unassailable
bliss of mind and invulnerable glory of body ; that
both mind and body in Him should have become
a prey to pain and sorrow and death is the result
of a miracle. Through an act of His omnipotence,
Christ in His own person suspended the natural law
of Hypostatic Union, the law that makes complete
bliss of mind the immortality of the body. Through
the fact of Hypostatic Union Christ's human mind
was endowed, from the very first moment of its
own self-consciousness, with the clear vision of God,
commonly called Beatific Vision. Now, such a
completeness of blissful contemplation brings with
itself a quickening and a glorifying of the whole
bodily organism, such as theology teaches will take
place in the glorious resurrection of the elect at
the end of the world. A glorified mind— that is to
say, a mind under Beatific Vision — means a glorified
body, by a natural concomitance or causality,
which theologians call redundantia — a flowing over
of the higher bliss into the lower powers. This
redundantia is a natural psychological law.

With Christ, or rather in Christ, this law was

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE 135

miraculously suspended by His own omnipotence.
The term ' miracle ' taken technically is not too
strong to describe this great spiritual anomaly in
Christ's Personality. A miracle is a suspension of
the results of the ordinary laws, either material
or spiritual, by a direct divine interposition. Fire,
whilst remaining fire and keeping its activity,
and yet not burning a naturally combustible object
within its range, is a miracle. Both the fire and
the combustible object must remain in their native
state in order that there should be a suspension
of laws. If divine omnipotence changed, say,
the nature of the combustible to make it fireproof,
there would be no suspension of laws ; it would not
be the kind of miracle that would need necessarily
divine omnipotence. My reader will readily forgive
my digression if I remind him of my aim in all
this : Christ's immunity, by birthright, from
suffering. Such was His immunity that the
suspension of that immunity belongs to the class
of miraculous effects best instanced by fire and
straw keeping their respective properties and not
burning when brought into contact.

Nothing but such faith in Christ's immunity
could make us grasp the meaning of scriptural
expressions like the one in St. Paul's Epistle to
the Philippians, chapter ii.

1 For let this mind be in you, which was also
in Christ Jesus : who, being in the form of God,

136 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

thought it not robbery to be equal with God : but
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,
being made in the likeness of men, and in habit
found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross/

All the humiliation and abasement of the
Incarnation lie in this doctrine. The union of
the Second Person of the Trinity, with a finite
created nature, could never be considered as the
' humiliation.' It is, on the contrary, one of
the masterpieces of God's omnipotence. Moreover,
Divinity itself could not be ' abased ' without
infinite loss to the whole creation, besides its being
inherently impossible, as I have said already. But
that Christ should appear under the form of a
servant, as slave, was indeed humiliation, and
abasement inconceivably great. The Risen Christ,
the Christ of to-day, has no shadow of humilia-
tion. Hypostatic Union with a glorified human
nature, such as was postulated by the very laws
of Christ's Beatific Vision would have lacked
completely the element of humiliation.

I now quote St. Thomas himself, stating the
great psychological miracle inside Christ's Person.
1 By the power of His Divinity, as a special dis-
pensation (dispensative), bliss was thus kept back
in the soul, that it did not flow down into the
body, lest the power of suffering and of dying
should be taken away from Him. And in the

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE 137

same way the delights of the vision were thus
pent up in His mind, that nothing of these went
down to the sensitive powers, lest by that sense-
suffering should be rendered impossible/ 1

The best paraphrase on this very tersely put
doctrine is given by Cajetan, when he comments
on the doctrine of St. Thomas on Christ's Trans-
figuration.2 So persistent are the views of those
great thinkers as to the miraculous nature of
Christ's passibleness, that Cajetan, in speaking of the
momentary glory of Christ's body in the Trans-
figuration, considers such a manifestation a new
miracle, because the first miracle — the miracle
of the suspension — was to be of so permanent a
character that its cessation for a moment meant
another interference on the part of Omnipotence.
1 Let us grant therefore that both phenomena were
miraculous ; I mean that Christ's body should not
shine (with glory), and that it shone thus in the
Transfiguration. But the former is part of the first
and, so to say> universal and old (antiquum) miracle
that took place in the Incarnation, by which was
suspended that communication of glory from the
Soul to the Body of Christ, in order that He might
have a passible body. . . . The latter phenomenon
belongs to a special miracle, by which was granted
that moment, to the passible body, the power of
shining.'

1 Quest. 15, art. 5, ad 3 m, ! Quest. 45, art. 2.

138 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

After establishing the principles of Christ's
natural immunity from suffering, and of His natural
right to highest beatific bliss of soul and body,
our theology inquires how much of human pain
and sadness Christ took upon Himself. For the
miraculous suspension was anything but a wanton
courting of human misery. That He should take
as much and no more than was necessary for the
aim of His Incarnation is to be taken for granted,
on the principle that He acted with consummate
wisdom and prudence in everything, as He is the
Incarnate Wisdom of God.

In the fourth article of question 14 St. Thomas
has an exhaustive study as to the kind of human
infirmities and passibilities which it was fit for
Christ to take upon Himself. The ruling principle
is the raising up of the human race through the
Incarnation. Only such infirmities were to be
assumed which were co-extensive with the race
itself, and whose healing in Christ would affect
the healing of the whole race. Infirmities that
come from private causes, not universal racial
causes, Christ had not to take upon Himself.
St. Thomas quotes hunger and thirst and death
as racial infirmities. Other infirmities called illness
are not racial ; they come from particular causes.
However vast those causes may be, they are not
universal and co-extensive with the race itself.

No doubt it would be difficult, at this time of

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE 139

the day, to say what limitations in our bodily
well-being are racial, and what are of less com-
prehensive an origin. No doubt a human organism
with just the racial limitations in it, without any
vestige of decadence that comes from heredity,
would be a marvellous fount of life. Yet, in strict
theology, Christ's body was such. His own per-
sonal wisdom and moderation of life made any
suffering that comes from an ignorance of the art
of life absolutely unthinkable. It is practically
impossible for us to grasp what a supremely refined
life Christ's was, from this absence of any hereditary
taint. His body had been fashioned by the Holy
Ghost Himself from a stainless human blood.
Moreover, as St. Thomas points out in this same
article, as fulness of grace and wisdom was as
necessary to the work of the Incarnation as suffering,
Christ could never have allowed in Himself any
defect that would have interfered in the least with
such a perfection of holiness and knowledge : there
was no ignorance in Him, no mental tardiness, no
contradiction between the higher and the lower
powers. Though such defects may be racial in
their extent, yet Christ took exception to them,
as they are in opposition to consummate sanctity.
We owe great thanks to our theology for having
kept our Christ in this serene height of bodily
purity and health, for having made it possible for
us to find in Him at the same time the most perfect

140 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

example of patience in pain and suffering, as well
as the undying fount of spiritual and bodily health.

It is evident from all this that nothing is less
in conformity with the Christ idea than the accumu-
lation of hereditary infirmities that weigh down
mankind. Christ banished them from His own
body ; so it is a Christian policy, so to speak, to
banish them from the human race to any extent
human means may allow.

On the other hand, when such infirmities have
taken hold on us, their patient endurance becomes
closely allied with Christ's patience on the cross.
For though He did not take such infirmities on
Himself, He willingly took those older and more
universal infirmities that are the parents of newer
forms of suffering.

To a suggestion that it would have been more
generous of Christ to take on Himself every kind
of human weakness, in order to heal them all,
St. Thomas answers: 'To the first objection I
answer that all particular defects in men are caused
by the corruptibility and passibility of the body,
with the addition of certain particular causes.
And therefore as Christ healed the passibility and
corruptibility of our body by the very fact of
taking them on Himself, as a consequence He has

healed all the other defects.' >

Christ's body is a source of life through its
1 Quest. 14, Art. 4.

THE FORM OF THE SLAVE 141

matchless perfection of nature and grace. St.
Thomas insists frequently on the causes of this
most heavenly temperament of Christ's bodily
frame : the active generative cause and the passive
material element. The Holy Ghost Himself is
the first, and Mary's most pure blood is the second,
of the two total causes of our Lord's human body.
Who can tell the riches of health and life and
grace hidden in an organism of such origin ? Signi-
ficantly St. Thomas teaches in article two of the
eighth question that Christ is the head of men both
through His soul and His body. ' Therefore the
whole humanity of Christ — that is to say both
according to (His) soul and (His) body — exerts an
influence on men, both with regard to (their) soul
and with regard to (their) body.

CHAPTER XXI

THE TRANSITION

Christ's passing at the age of thirty from ordinary
human life into one of power, claiming to be that
of the Son of God, was abrupt and unexpected.
Nothing in His daily existence had prepared His
townsmen for this sudden exchange of roles. That
He was the village carpenter is evident from the
phrase on the lips of the people of Nazareth, quoted
by St. Mark. ' And when the sabbath was come,
he began to teach in the synagogue : and many
hearing him were in admiration at his doctrine,
saying, How came this man by all these things ?
and what wisdom is this that is given to him, and
such mighty works as are wrought by his hands ?
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the
brother of James, and Joseph, and Jude, and
Simon ? Are not also his sisters here with us ? And
they were scandalised in regard of him/1

St. Joseph was dead, and Jesus had succeeded to
his foster-father's modest business. St. Matt. xiii. 55
makes the people of Nazareth say : ' Is not this

1 Mark vi. 2, 3.

THE TRANSITION 143

the carpenter's son ? ' whilst St. Mark's text points
clearly to the fact that Jesus Himself had followed
the parental avocation.

Adam Bede has become the classical instance,
in English literature, of the noble son of the soil,
grand in his simple manhood, for whom it was
God's will that he should be a good carpenter.
There is no profaneness in thinking of Christ, at
Nazareth, going about His work in the simple
uprightness of a strong and straightforward man,
to whom the great secrets of His spiritual life were
never a temptation even to look mysterious and
secretive.

The Gospel narratives are documents of supreme
good taste. The element of useless mysteriousness,
of irritating secretiveness is entirely banished
from them. The apocrypha, on the contrary,
exploit bravely this situation, so full of possible
thrills for the vulgar mind, a human being that is
a God, and yet of set purpose hiding his identity,
with just enough hints and glimpses given to the
entourage to make the situation interesting, till
finally the veil falls.

No human being ever possessed the noble quality
of reserve in the degree it was possessed by the divine
carpenter, the son of David.

But when the hour of His manifestation came,
it came with incontrovertible clearness and irre-
sistible power. It came as an immense surprise to

144 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Christ's friends and acquaintances. In their be-
wilderment they had the one explanation always at
hand for nonplussed family circles, sudden insanity.
' And when his friends had heard of it, they went out
to lay hold on him : for they said, He is become
mad/ *

The Baptism at the hands of John and the great
fast with its mysterious temptations were events
still unknown to the world. John alone had seen
the open heaven, had heard the voice from above.
The calling of the first disciples, with such irresist-
ible imperiousness of will, was Christ's first asser-
tion of His Divinity. A few days later there was
the miracle at Cana, the first sign. From that day
Christ's progress was rapid and overpowering, so
that He could not openly go into the city, but was
without in desert places ; and they flocked to Him
from all sides. ■ But he being gone out, began to
publish and to blaze abroad the word ; so that he
could not openly go into the city, but was with-
out in desert places : and they flocked to him
from all sides.' 2 The hatred of the Pharisaical
body and their conspiracy to destroy Him are
events that already belong to the first months of
Christ's public appearance. ' And the Pharisees
going out, immediately made a consultation with
the Herodians against him, how they might destroy
him/ 8

1 Mark iii, St. * Mark i, 45. s Mark iii* 6.

THE TRANSITION 145

The abruptness of this transition from the normal
human existence into an all-bewildering manifesta-
tion of superhuman powers, whilst perfectly com-
patible with the principles of Hypostatic Union,
contradicts any theory that makes of Christ's
ascendancy the gradual evolution of a saintly life
and superior personality.

Jewish tradition, the outcome of the Jewish
love for the marvellous and mysterious, was all in
favour of a Christ whose origin would be wrapped
up in impenetrable mystery. ' And behold he
speaketh openly, and they say nothing to him.
Have the rulers known for a truth that this is the
Christ. But we know this man whence he is :
but when the Christ cometh, no man knoweth
whence he is.' *

No prophet's home life and early upbringing were
so clearly known as Christ's. ' Jesus therefore cried
out in the temple, teaching and saying, You both
know me, and you know whence I am ; but I am
not come of myself ; but he that sent me is true,
whom ye know not.' a Everybody in Jerusalem
knew that He belonged to the class of the illiterate.
' And the Jews wondered, saying, How doth this
man know letters, having never learned ? ' 3 The
sudden reputation of the young teacher had no
doubt produced a great eagerness and curiosity as

1 St. John vii, 26, 27. I St, John vii. 28,

• St. John vii, 15.

146 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

to his antecedents. But there was nothing to learn,
nothing to marvel at. The most ordinary, the
most uneventful, past was the only thing that met
the gaze of the inquisitive busybody.

No religion indeed aims so little at the marvellous
for its own sake as the religion of Christ. ' Ordi-
nariness ' of condition is the rule, and there is no
limit as to the spiritual worth that may be found
within this ordinariness of the conditions of human
existence.

It is precisely this complete ordinariness of His
previous life that was the great stumbling-block to
the Jewish mind. The greatest miracles seemed
powerless to efface that first fact. The men of
Nazareth were scandalised in regard of Him. ' Is
not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother
of James, and Joseph, and Jude, and Simon ? Are
not also his sisters here with us ? And they were
scandalised in regard of him.' *

' And when the men were come unto him, they
said, John the Baptist hath sent us to thee, saying :
Art thou he that art to come, or look we for an-
other ? (And in that same hour he cured many of
their diseases, and hurts, and evil spirits ; and to
many that were blind he gave sight.) And answer-
ing, he said to them, Go and relate to John what
you have heard and seen ; the blind see, the lame
walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the

1 Mark vi. 3,

THE TRANSITION 147

dead rise again, to the poor the gospel is preached :
And blessed is he whosoever shall not be scandalised
in me.' l This last verse seems a strange conclusion
to that enumeration of miraculous deeds of the
highest order, such as the raising up of the dead.
But it finds its natural commentary in the analo-
gous passage of St. Mark, where Christ's nearest
acquaintances are said to have been scandalised
with regard to Him, though they admitted the fact
of the ' mighty works ' as ' wrought by his hands/
All this goes to show how completely Christ took
His countrymen by surprise when He began to
1 manifest His glory.' 2

Christ had His ' hour.' ' And Jesus saith to
her : Woman what is that to me and to thee ?
my hour is not yet come.' 3 Before that hour had
come, no power in the world, except the prayers
of His mother, could open His lips, or get Him to
reveal the ineffable secret of His Personality.
But when He thought that the hour had come,
the secret unburdened itself from His breast
with the rush of a mighty stream.

This complete mastery of Christ over His own
feelings, His own destiny, expressed in the term
' my hour,' is a cherished idea in the Gospel of St.
John. Besides the passages just quoted, where it
refers to the great transition from obscurity to
Divinity, it marks other new phases of Christ's

1 Luke vii, 20-23. * St, John ii, It, 3 St, John ii. 4,

l 2

148 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

career. ' They sought therefore to apprehend him :
and no man laid hands on him, because his hour
was not yet come.' * ' These words Jesus spoke in
the treasury, teaching in the temple and no man
laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet
come.' 2 ' But Jesus answered them, saying : The
hour is come, that the Son of Man should be
glorified.' 3 • Before the festival day of the pasch,
Jesus knowing that his hour was come, that he
should pass out of this world to the Father, having
loved his own who were in the world, he loved
them unto the end.'4

There is an apparent contradiction in the Gospels
in this matter of Christ's manifestation. His birth
was surrounded with the elements of the miraculous ;
and not once is an appeal made to it in Christ's
later career. It is hardly credible that the vision
of the shepherds on the night of the Nativity,
and the visit of the wise men from the East, left
no traces on the popular imagination. After all,
thirty years is not a long period, and for a nation
like the Jewish nation, the marvellous is remembered
with infinite care and delight. No doubt the
traditions survived ; perhaps even they acquired
volume and strength with time. But there is one
providential circumstance told in the Gospels which
alters the case completely : the rapid and prolonged

1 St. John vii. 30. 9 St. John viii. 20,

• St. John xii. 23. * St John xiii, 1.

THE TRANSITION 149

change of abode of the family round which there had
been the momentary glory. The disappearance into
Egypt of the ' Holy Family/ told by St. Matthew
(chapter ii.), deprived the glorious tale of its hero,
and instead of making the reputation of Mary's
Son, it helped to swell the volume of fair legends
that made everybody look to the immediate coming
of the Messiah. Far from helping Christ's cause,
they went against Him, as the fact of His having
been born at Bethlehem was not known. ' Of
that multitude therefore, when they had heard
these words of his, some said, This is the prophet
indeed. Others said, This is the Christ. But
some said, Doth the Christ come out of Galilee ?
Doth not the scripture say : that Christ cometh of
the seed of David, and from Bethlehem, the town
where David was ? So there arose a dissension
among the people because of him.' * If the
memory of the vision of the shepherds and of
the star had survived, the carpenter from Galilee
was to be the very last person to be associated with
it. There was no such interruption in the traditions
round the person of John the Baptist. ' And fear
came upon all their neighbours ; and all these
things were noised abroad over all the hill country
of Judea. And all they that had heard them laid
them up in their hearts, saying, What an one,
think ye, shall this child be ? For the hand of the

1 St. John vii, 40-43.

150 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Lord was with him.' * He was in the desert, it
is true, but never far from the hills that had
re-echoed the marvels of his birth. ' And the
child grew, and was strengthened in spirit,
and was in the deserts until the day of his mani-
festation to Israel.' 2 It is not surprising therefore
to find that the moment he showed himself to
the world, without any miracle or signs on
his part, he should have been thought Christ
by the most sincere of the Jews. * And as the
people were of opinion, and all were thinking in
their hearts of John, that perhaps he might be
the Christ ; John answered, saying unto all, I
indeed baptise you with water ; but there shall
come one mightier than I, the latchet of whose
shoes I am not worthy to loose : he shall baptise
you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.' 3 John's
birth coincided closely enough with the period
of the visit of the magi ; nothing was easier than
to associate him vaguely with the events of Christ's
birth. It is certainly a surprising thing that this
offspring of the tribe of Levi should have been
hailed as the Christ with such readiness, when it
was one of the staunchest beliefs of the Jewish
people that Christ would be the son of David.

But if anything becomes clear, through the
careful analysis of the New Testament documents,

1 St, Luke i. 65, 66. * St. Luke i, 80,

* St, Luke iii. 15, 16,

THE TRANSITION 151

it is this : the Son of Mary was the very last
man who would have had the benefit of the Messianic
legends and hopes, so ripe in the Jewish nation of
His day. He had to stand on the strength of His
own divine powers. To say that Christ owed His
success to a clever use and exploitation of the
popular Messianic expectations of the day is an
open contempt of written history.

CHAPTER XXII

CHRIST'S SINCERITY

Christ's life is the greatest of all biographies.
It contains the root-elements of every biography
worth reading : intense sincerity pitted against
the elementary human passions of jealousy, pride,
avarice, and cowardice, and these elements are
found in their highest human power.

It would be an immense spiritual loss to us
if the thought of Christ's omnipotent control
over His own destiny were apprehended by us
in a sense that would diminish the sincerity and
reality of the Christ-tragedy. We could never
love deeply and perseveringly one in whose career
there are unrealities, even if the unrealities were
for the highest end. Thus if the treason of Judas
had not been to Christ a disappointment as keen
and as human as any betraying of confidence
might be to me, the Lord's Passion would not
be able to rivet my wondering sympathy.

But we easily fall a prey to our limited imagin-
ation, when our thoughts are busy with Christ.

CHRIST'S SINCERITY 153

We put the operations of His Godhead there,
from where He had withdrawn them. The im-
pression under which we constantly live, that
after all Christ had it in His power to avoid all
the evils that befell Him, sometimes paralyzes our
attempts to penetrate more deeply into the wonder-
ful human sequel of the great biography. Now,
though it is the saint's constant wonderment
that Christ, having it in His power to escape from
his enemies, did not escape, such a consideration
is conducive to a deeper love of Christ then only
when it is coupled with the consideration that
the exercise of such a power would have meant
a redemption inferior to the redemption under
which we live now. If Christ did not exert His
power, it was because there were grave reasons
for Him to act thus, and the reasons were con-
nected with man's greater spiritual welfare.

The primary fact in Christ's history is His
appearing in ' the form of a servant, being made
in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a
man.' It is the all-pervading element of the great
biography, it is the one great fact which nothing
could alter, because God had decided that for
mankind's salvation such a form of incarnation
was best. As great men are born with their
characters, and as they are born into a definite
state of human things, and as nothing can alter
this primary fact, so likewise Christ had to appear

154 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

in the form of a servant. No doubt it was in God's
power to have made an incarnation that would
not start with the form of a servant, but with
the glory of the heir. But the former having
been selected, for the higher spiritual exaltation
of the human race, Christ's life was bound to be
a tragedy.

This is why Our Lord's life may easily be
studied according to the canons of ordinary human
biography, and why it is found to be of all bio-
graphies the greatest. When I use the expression
'ordinary human biography,' I do not of course
forget Christ's miraculous powers.

But taking for granted a miracle-working
Christ, as you take for granted, say, a preternatur-
ally far-sighted statesman, I say that, according
to the canons of human biographies, a Christ
who persisted in keeping hid within Himself His
Godhead, out of charity for man, and who had
to win faith in His Godhead by miracles, could
easily become the world's greatest tragedy.

From the moment Christ makes His first public
appearance up to the sealing of His sepulchre
by public authorities, ' lest the disciples come and
steal His body,' there is nothing that need surprise
us ; in fact, it does not surprise us. If once we
have mastered the character of the Pharisee, we
can foresee that there is little chance for Christ.

This is the reason why men of every school of

CHRIST'S SINCERITY 155

thought are able to make of the Gospels their
life study. Even the rationalist, who does not
believe in Christ's Divinity, is found to say true and
illuminating things concerning the psychological
sequel of Christ's human career. No one but a
madman will deny that Christ stood amongst His
contemporaries with a power and a majesty such
as no man ever possessed. A little good will would
be enough to identify Christ's superhuman position
with Christ's power of miracles. But this super-
human attitude once accepted, the Gospels are a
human biography. Christ's claim to be the Son of
God explains the jealousy of the Pharisee, because
Christ was to all appearances a man, and because
He supported His claim with undoubted miracles.
' I and the Father are one. The Jews then took
up stones to stone him. Jesus answered them,
Many good works I have shewed you from my
Father ; for which of those works do you stone me ?
The Jews answered him, For a good work we stone
thee not, but for blasphemy ; and because that
thou, being a man, makest thyself God.' x

' The chief priests therefore and the Pharisees
gathered a council, and said, What do we ? for this
man doeth many miracles. If we let him alone so,
all will believe in him ; and the Romans will come
and take away our place and nation.' 2

Nothing could express better the whole situation

1 St. John x, 30-33. * St John xi. 47, 48.

156 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

than those words. The miracle-worker, being a
man, claims oneness with the Father ; let Him
suffer the death of the blasphemer. His miracles
are a danger.

The Pharisee, the man who sins against the
Holy Ghost, ought to be our chief character-study
in connection with the Gospels. If once we have
fathomed him, we see easily that the Son of Mary
is doomed to death, unless He depart from that great
reserve that makes Him hide His Divinity. Judas,
Pilate, Herod, the mocking soldiery, the scourging,
the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion, become
events that explain themselves naturally, through
the ordinary elementary hatreds and weaknesses of
human nature.

There are many passages in the New Testament
pointing to the co-operation of Satan in bringing
about Christ's death on the cross. It is a favourite
theme with writers of all periods to make the drama
of our Redemption reach the climax when Satan
knows that he has destroyed his own kingdom, when
he finds out that the Christ murdered at his
suggestion was the Son of God, and that the death
on the cross invented by satanic jealousy was
God's preordained means of saving mankind.

We may easily grant such dramatic presentment
of the Redemption without there being occasioned
by it the least flaw in the human sequel of events in
the Christ-biography. Satan's co-operation with

CHRIST'S SINCERITY 157

man's act, far from superseding human activity
or filling up gaps in the causal series of human
events, depends entirely on human perverseness
and wickedness for its own efficacy. The powers
of darkness cannot work except in darkness, and
the dark conscience of the Pharisees was more
than ready to receive the suggestions of the spirit
of wickedness in high places. Satan's share in the
Crucifixion, far from rendering the Christ tragedy
less human, gave it on the contrary an additional
human cruelty and grimness, as Satan's work is
always to stir up the deepest and darkest instincts
of the corrupt human heart.

What we all ought to bear in mind is the human
origin and the human sequel of the Christ -tragedy.
Once it is granted that ' it behoved Him in all
things to be made like unto His brethren, that He
might become a merciful and faithful high priest
before God,' x — once it is granted that the best
Redemption was the most absolute identification of
Christ with ordinary human conditions, there was
enough love and enough hatred in man to bring
about the Christ -tragedy. How in God's wisdom
the prescience of it all could become the will of His
heart does not belong to the created plane of thinking.
On the one hand there is the clear fact of human sin,
the greatest of all sjhs, the sin against the Holy
Ghost, which is the full and direct human cause, and,

1 Heb. ii, 17.

158 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

to all appearance, the total cause of Christ's death.
On the other hand there is the fact of revelation
that it was the Father's will that mankind should be
saved by death on the cross.

No finite mind is able to grasp the harmonious
interlocking of those two great causes : an infinitely
holy will and an immensely perverted will. Infini-
tude of power and wisdom is the only explanation.
' The Father gave up Christ (to death) and He
Himself gave Himself up out of charity, and there-
fore They are praised for it. But Judas gave Him
up out of jealousy, Pilate gave Him up out of
worldly fear because he feared Caesar, and therefore
they are blamed." * No happier and shorter propo-
sition could be framed to state the causalities at
work in Christ's fate than this simple answer of
St. Thomas to an objector who could not see how
1 The Father ' and Judas could both be said to have
delivered up the Son of God.

In the same article St. Thomas thus defines the
Father's role in Christ's Passion. ■ God the Father
delivered up Christ to suffering in a threefold way :
Firstly, as far as He in His eternal will preordained
Christ's passion to be the deliverance of the human
race. Secondly, as far as He inspired Christ with
the willingness to suffer for us, pouring Charity
into Him. . . . Thirdly, not saving Him from
suffering, but leaving Him at the mercy of His

» Quest, 47, art. 3.

CHRIST'S SINCERITY 159

persecutors/ Christ's own share in bringing on
Himself the great storm is thus analysed by St.
Thomas in the first article of the same question :
* One is the cause of an event indirectly, because one
does not prevent it, when one could : just as a man
is said to pour water on some one else, because he
does not shut the window through which rain comes
in. And it is in this wise that Christ Himself was
the cause of His own suffering and death. For He
could have prevented His suffering and death, firstly
checking His enemies, so as to render them incapable
or unwilling to kill Him. Secondly, because His
spirit had power to preserve intact the nature of His
body, lest it should succumb under any lesion, which
power Christ's soul possessed because it was united
with the Word of God in oneness of person. There-
fore as the soul of Christ did not keep from the
body the hurts inflicted on it, but rather as it willed
that the bodily nature should succumb under the
infliction, Christ is said to have given up His life,
or to have died willingly.'

But such power, again, Christ could not have
exerted without our Redemption being less bountiful,
and if He was to give Himself to man without reserve
or restriction, He had to be the helpless prey of
man's darkest passions. The Father would have
sent Him twelve legions of angels, if He had asked,
in virtue of His birthright. But how could one with
twelve legions of angels surrounding Him turn

i6o THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

round and look at Peter with a look that brought the
truest and warmest tears to human eyes that were
ever shed ? ' And Peter, going out, wept bitterly.
And the men that held Him mocked him, and struck
him, and they blindfolded him, and smote his
face/ l It is from the midst of such a gathering
of lowest humanity that Christ won back the
faithless disciple to a penitent love that was to be
stronger than death.

1 St. Luke xxii. 62-64.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE GREAT LIFE

Christ's mortal career is a most complete and most
perfect act in itself ; it has a fulness that makes it
a source of life for all ages to come.

It is perhaps not too much to say that the
general tendency of the human mind is a tendency to
belittle the importance of the individual life — I mean
the mortal career of individual people. Man soon
begins to dream of possible new existences for the
same individual where things might be done and
duties might be fulfilled which have been omitted
and neglected during the first mortal life. One need
only remember the doctrine of the migration of souls,
the most wide-spread theory on the Hereafter we
know of ; no doubt, as most human lives look so
worthless, man's innate wish for better things makes
such beliefs part of the human optimism.

Christianity is indeed of all religions the most
optimistic religion ; but its optimism never degener-
ates into a vagueness of hope ; its optimism is
essentially this, that it thinks highly of the possi-
bilities of the one mortal life of which we are certain

162 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

as being the one chance for every individual.
Christianity constantly reins in the human imagin-
ation, only too prone to overlook the blessings of
the present hour for the fairy tales of uncertain
existences in the future.

Christ's mortal life has become to Christ's Church
the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega,
the consummation of all sanctity, the source of all
grace. There is no re-acting of that great life ;
it has been acted once, and the act was indeed a
delight to the eyes of God and of the Angels of God.

Christ Himself insists emphatically on the
importance of His one life, to do the work of His
Father. * And Jesus passing by saw a man who was
blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him :
Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents,
that he should be born blind ? Jesus answered,
Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents ;
but that the works of God should be made manifest
in him. I must work the works of him that sent
me, whilst it is day : the night cometh, when no
man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am
the light of the world.' *

• I have glorified thee on the earth : I have
finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And
now glorify thou me, 0 Father, with thyself, with
the glory which I had, before the world was, with
thee.' 2

1 St, John ix. 1-5, ■ St. John xvii. 4, 5,

THE GREAT LIFE 163

This same theological idea is one of the leading
thoughts in that most perfect resume of Christology :
the Epistle to the Hebrews. ' Then said I, Behold
I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away
the first, that he may establish that which followeth.
In the which will we are sanctified by the oblation
of the body of Jesus Christ once. And every priest
indeed standeth daily ministering, and often offer-
ing the same sacrifices, which can never take away
sins. But this man, offering one sacrifice for sins,
for ever sitteth on the right hand of God ; from
henceforth expecting until his enemies be made his
footstool. For by one oblation he hath perfected
for ever them that are sanctified. And the Holy
Ghost also doth testify this to us ; for after that he
said, And this is the testament which I will make
unto them after those days, saith the Lord. I will
give my laws in their hearts, and on their minds will
I write them : And their sins and iniquities I will
remember no more. Now where there is a remission
of these, there is no more an oblation for sin/ *

In another chapter I shall show how this one-
ness of life in Christ is not contradicted but rather
emphasised by the doctrine of the Christian Euchar-
ist ; but there is one remark I should like to make
here. It is the impression of the writer of this
book that certain pious folks have not been proof
against that weakness of the human mind mentioned

1 Heb. x. 9-18.

M 2

164 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

above, the tendency of multiplying lives, because
the first life somehow seems to lack fulness and
sufficiency. Not a small amount of modern euchar-
istic literature is tainted with this tendency. Good
men and pious men make of the Eucharistic Presence
a kind of second existence of Christ, a kind of
mortal career that goes on for ever and ever, a
kind of self-abasement on the part of the Son of
God greater even than His first abasement.

Now, I should be the very last person to put
a check on the enthusiasm of Christian feeling
round the great sacramental marvel. With St.
Thomas Aquinas I say here :

Quantum potes, tantum All words of thine but

aude ; feebly tell

Quia major omni laude, Thy God's transcend-
Nec laudare sufficis. ent worth ;

Yet let thy loud re-
joicings swell
And reach the ends
of earth.
Missal. Sequence.

At the same time there is the great fact that
Christ's mortal career was all fulness, and that
through His resurrection He entered into glory
for ever.

The presence and existence of Christ in the
Holy Eucharist are not a human presence, a human
existence, in the sense in which He was present

THE GREAT LIFE 165

or existent in His mortal days. It is not even
a presence or existence that resembles in any way
Christ's glorified presence and existence in heaven,
such as He is now. It is a presence, it is an
existence which is absolutely new, infinitely different
from any known mode of presence and existence.

People who talk of the Eucharistic Presence in
language that could not apply to anything except
an ordinary human life could do nothing better
than study the seventy-sixth question of the third
part of the Summa, with its eight highly meta-
physical articles. ' The manner according to
which Christ is in this Sacrament/ But let me
quote from the seventh article, whether Christ's
body, such as it is in this sacrament, could be
seen by a bodily eye, at least if the bodily eye
were that of a glorified (risen) body. ' Therefore,
speaking quite accurately, Christ's body, accord-
ing to the manner of existence which It has in
this sacrament, is not discernible either by sense
or imagination, but by the intellect only, which
is called the spiritual eye. It is however per-
ceived differently, according to the differences of
intellect. For as the mode of existence, according
to which Christ is in this sacrament, is entirely
supernatural, it can be seen in its proper state
by the supernatural intellect— I mean the divine
intellect ; and as a consequence it can be seen
by the glorified intellect of either angel or man,

166 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

who through the vision of the divine essence, in
virtue of that participated clarity of the divine
intellect in them, see things that are supernatural.
As for the intellect of man still in his mortal career,
it cannot see it except by faith, as is the case with
all things supernatural. But even the angelic
intellect, left to its natural resources, is unable
to see Christ's (sacramental) body. Therefore the
demons cannot see through their intellect Christ
in this sacrament, except by faith.'

Church history is full of marvellous events
centring round the consecrated elements of the
Eucharist, such as palpable flesh taking the place
of the consecrated Host, or warm blood issuing
forth from the sacramental Element, or even
the Eucharistic Bread taking the form of the
Divine Infant, for the consolation of the faith-
ful or the conviction of the doubter. St. Thomas
treats of the objective value of such miraculous
phenomena in the eighth article of the same ques-
tion lxxvi. His explanations are satisfying ; the
phenomenon is either a subjective impression
in the beholder, or an objective preternatural
and permanent effect round about the conse-
crated species. But the real substance of Christ's
body does not come into the phenomenon ; it re-
mains hid in its inaccessible mysteriousness. ' Such
transformed sacramental elements,' he says, ' have
sometimes been shut up and reserved, at the sugges-

THE GREAT LIFE 167

tion of a body of bishops, in a pyx. Quod nefas
esset de Christo sentire secundum propriam speciem.
It would be wickedness to hold such opinion of
Christ in His proper nature.'

This energetic condemnation on the part of
Aquinas of the idea of Christ being shut up, a
prisoner as it were, in material surroundings, though
it be under a eucharistic transformation, shows
well how repugnant to Catholic theology are ways
of stating the Eucharist Presence in other terms
than those of the sacramental Transubstantiation.

There are two distinct points of doctrine with
regard to the great Christian Eucharist. The first
point is the Real Presence : Christ is really present.
This is the point over which Christians are divided,
some being satisfied with a mystical, spiritual
presence of Christ's body, whilst others, taking the
Gospel literally, hold that besides the mystical
spiritual presence, Christ's bodily reality is there,
and that the spiritual, the mystical reality is
an effect, an outflow of the bodily reality thus
present. This first point contains nothing as to
the manner of that bodily presence.

The second point is an exclusively Catholic
point ; it has long been part of the Catholic theology
on the blessed Eucharist, and the Council of Trent
raised it to a Catholic dogma. It is the dogma of
Transubstantiation, the dogma, I might say, of the
mode of Christ's presence. Christ is there, in the

168 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

consecrated element, because the consecrated element
has been changed, transubstantiated into Christ's
body, by God's omnipotence, not by a kind of
' impanation,' of taking up His abode in the bread,
as Lutheran theology would have it. It is easy to
see how the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation
removes the mode of Christ's Eucharistic Presence
into the region of the mysterious and miraculous
beyond any other theory. A Catholic ought to be
the very last man to apply to Christ's Eucharistic
Presence modes of speech that souad ludicrous when
not applied to the normal, natural human life, with
its lights and its shadows, its trials and its virtues.

I have risked wearying the reader with the
refutation of possible aberrations of Catholic piety,
because I feel how important it is for our spiritual
life to go back constantly to Christ's mortal life, to
find these not only every virtue and every example,
but also finality of virtue and of example.

' Who in the days of his flesh, with a strong cry
and tears, offering up prayers and supplications to
him that was able to save him from death, was
heard for his reverence. And whereas he indeed was
the Son of God, he learned obedience by the things
which he suffered ; and being consummated he
became, to all that obey him, the cause of eternal
salvation.' x

In another chapter I shall show the relation-
1 Heb. v. 7, 8, 9.

THE GREAT LIFE 169

ship between the Eucharist and Christ's life and
death. But whatever that relationship, Christ,
like all other viator es, pilgrims on earth, has only
one earthly life, one human life, one life of prayer,
and struggle, and merit, and edification, for His
brethren : the life of thirty-three years in Palestine.
Everything in the spiritual order, not excepting
the Eucharist itself, comes from that great life,
and goes back to it. Christ's Eucharistic Presence
cannot be called a human life ; it cannot be said
to show forth human virtues ; it cannot be regarded
as containing ethical perfections that might be a
pattern to the Christian, or ethical perfections in
any way superior to the ethical perfections of His
mortal career. It is a presence so eminently
miraculous, so absolutely beyond the laws of
humanity, that God alone is able to watch the
pulsation of that hidden life.

In order to remain faithful to my programme of
describing the Christ of theology, I have to confine
myself to one aspect of the great life, the theological
aspect. We are happily in possession of excellent
works, endless in their variety, on the historical
and spiritual aspects of the great life. Now the
aspect of the great life, which, to my mind, con-
stitutes something deeply interesting for the religious
thinker, is the circumstance that Christ led an
ordinary social life, with the duties appropriate to
refined and civilised humanity.

170 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

He differs from the Baptist ; He is not a solitary,
an ascetic, a priest of the Levitical tribe ; He is
the son of David, of the tribe of Juda, of royal
descent. ' For he of whom these things are spoken
is of another tribe, of which no one attended the
altar. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out
of Juda ; in which tribe Moses spoke nothing con-
cerning priests/ 1

This ordinariness of Christ's life is a fact of such
significance that I do not hesitate to call it its
theological aspect, because it is an immense
acquisition to the history of human sanctity and
human spiritualness that the Son of God on earth
should have led a life not different in its external
arrangements from the ordinary social life of the
men of His time and His social standing. ' Is not
this the carpenter, the Son of Mary ? ' 2 This exclam-
ation on the lips of Christ's nearest acquaintances
shows well how completely human He had made
Himself, and how unprepared the Jewish mind
was to receive its heaven from the hands of an
artisan whom they had met daily for years past.

Nothing could be more suggestive, from the
point of view of the history of religion, than the
differences between the career of the Baptist and
the career of Christ. The Baptist was essentially
and deeply a Jewish saint from beginning to end.
Christ was not the kind of saint the Jew admired

1 Heb. vii, 13, 14, 2 St. Mark vi. 3.

THE GREAT LIFE 171

or could understand. John the Baptist was never
contradicted, he was never doubted by the people,
his mode of life was such as to make every word that
fell from his lips a rule of faith. The Pharisee
might indeed say of John, ' He hath a devil/ *
But then John had never spared them. ' Ye brood
of vipers, who hath shewed you to flee from the
wrath to come ? ' a Such had been the Baptist's
apostrophe to them. As for the people themselves,
their faith in John was implicit. ' And it came to
pass, that on one of the days, as he was teaching
the people in the temple, and preaching the gospel,
the chief priests and the scribes, with the ancients,
met together and spoke to him, saying : Tell us by
what authority dost thou these things ? Who is
he that hath given thee this authority ? And Jesus
answering said to them, I will also ask you one thing.
Answer me : The baptism of John, was it from
heaven, or of men ? But they thought within them-
selves, saying : If we shall say, From heaven, he
will say ; Why then did you not believe him ? But
if we say, Of men ; the whole people will stone us :
for they are persuaded that John was a prophet. And
they answered that they knew not whence it was.
And Jesus said to them, Neither do I tell you by what
authority I do these things/ 3

That one of so perfect a life should give testimony
to one whose mode of conversing in the world was

1 St. Matt. xi. 18. * St. Matt. iii. 7. 3 St. Luke xx, 1-8.

172 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

like any other man's conversing was indeed a great
puzzle to Christ's contemporaries. Christ was at
an enormous disadvantage with the Jewish mind,
owing to this ordinariness of life. His miracles,
his wonderful teaching, were no compensation to the
Jewish temperament for that absence of ascetical
austerity. It was rather a scandal unto them
that one with an ordinary kind of life should do
wonders and speak such wisdom. Had he been
amongst them, ' not eating and drinking/ the
miracles would have been hailed with enthusiasm.
' And going out from thence, he went into his own
country ; and his disciples followed him. And
when the sabbath was come, he began to teach in
the synagogue : and many hearing him were in
admiration of his doctrine, saying, How came this
man by all these things ? And what wisdom is
this that is given to him, and such mighty works
as are wrought by his hands ? Is not this the
carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James,
and Joseph, and Jude, and Simon ? Are not also
his sisters here with us ? And they were scandalised
in regard of him.' * ' And they come to a house,
and the multitude cometh together again, so that
they could not so much as eat bread. And when
his friends had heard of it, they went out to lay
hold on him ; for they said, He is become mad.'2
That spiritual greatness was possible within the
1 St. Mark vi. 1-3. a St. Mark iii. 19, 20, 21,

THE GREAT LIFE 173

ordinary conditions of human society was a truth
not yet realised. That a man could sit down to
dinner with his host and read at the same time
the secrets of the heart of those that approached
him was a lesson still to be learned by men. Jesus
had multiplied signs and wonders, but He failed
to win the confidence of the Jews. John had done
no sign, and yet his word was of immense weight.
1 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
But if I do, though you will not believe me, believe
the works : that you may know, and believe, that
the Father is in me, and I in the Father. They
sought therefore to take him : and he escaped out
of their hands. And he went again beyond the
Jordan, into that place where John was baptising
first ; and there he abode. And many resorted to
him, and they said, John indeed did no sign.
But all things, whatsoever John said of this man
were true. And many believed in him.' x

St. Thomas treats of the characteristics of
Christ's life in the fortieth question of the third
part of the Summa. De modo conversation's Christi
is the title of the treatise. I quote from the
commentary of Cajetan on the second article, as
embodying in a few words the essence of Christian
theology as to Christ's practical life amongst men.
1 Take notice and fix in your mind this doctrine,
viz. that Christ was an example of perfection in all

1 St. John x. 37-42.

174 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

things that belong necessarily to salvation. From
this you conclude that in those things which have
no necessary relation to salvation, things that have
no intrinsic goodness, but are good merely as means
to an end, such as obedience, poverty, and other
such practices, We ought not to ask from Christ
more austere things, as if they were more perfect.
But what we ought to find in Christ are the things
that belong to the final purpose of the Incarnation ;
whether such things be austere practices or not,
matters little.'

The great life is indeed an infinitely wise life,
because all its phases and all its duties are deter-
mined by this one consideration. It was a wisdom
of life the Jew could not understand ; for him a
garment of camel's hair was the spiritual marvel.
It is only the children of wisdom that can see the
beauty of that other life. ' The Son of man is come
eating and drinking ; and you say, Behold a man
that is a glutton and a drinker of wine, a friend of
publicans and sinners I And wisdom is justified
by all her children.' I

I may once more quote Cajetan, summing up
the doctrine of his great master, St. Thomas. The
terseness of the theologian is very helpful, as it is
so important for us all to take a true and sober view
of Christ's glorious life, the divinely authentic
pattern of human perfection. ' Christ adopted quite

1 St. Luke vii. 34, 35.

THE GREAT LIFE 175

appropriately social life as His mode of conversing
on earth, not solitary life. Such is the thesis of
St. Thomas. Now this is thus proven. Christ
was bound to adopt such a mode of life as would
best suit the purpose of the Incarnation. The
purpose of the Incarnation is best served by social
life. Therefore Christ was bound to choose social
life as His life. The purpose of the Incarnation
is threefold : first, to give testimony of the truth ;
second, to save sinners ; third, to bring men to
God. Now, all this means social life.' *

1 Commentary on first article of the fortieth question.

CHAPTER XXIV

GOD MEETING GOD

Personality, in the sense of its being a great
entitative reality, is, as I have said so often, at
the root of all the metaphysical momentum of
Hypostatic Union.

Personality, in the sense of its being a living,
overpowering influence, is at the root of all our
sanctification and exaltation in Christ. The two
views are not separable in practice, as Christ is a
Divine Person through that wondrous replacement
of personality so much spoken of in this book, for
our sakes, in order that we should gain highest
human perfection in Him.

Personality, in so far as it signifies a rational
being with distinct rights and claims, with a
distinct ethical estate as its inalienable property,
is at the root of that part of Christology called
Christ's Priesthood. This third view of personality
is not separable from the two preceding views, in
practice. But it is the predominating view when
we come to approach Christ's atonement — Christ's
sacerdotal role.

GOD MEETING GOD 177

Theologians have written whole folio-volumes
on this single question : ' The Priesthood of Christ.'
It seems no easy task to compress so great a thesis
into one single chapter. However, I have the
example of St. Thomas Aquinas, who finds that
one quaestio (the twenty-sixth), with six articles, is
sufficient even for the theologian. Besides, there is
the inspired treatise on Christ's Priesthood, the
Epistle to the Hebrews, a strictly theological thesis
with Rabbinic argumentation pressed effectively
into service.

The question might be asked whether Christ's
priestly office is anything different from His other
offices ; for instance, from His office as the mystical
Head of the Church. My answer is that the distinc-
tion is not clearly drawn anywhere, either in the
Apostolic writings or even in the theology of St.
Thomas. Atonement, mediation, sanctiflcation,
teaching, consoling, are all functions that may be
attributed to priesthood. The definition of a
priest, given in the Epistle to the Hebrews, covers
all such beneficent interventions on the part of the
God-man. ' For every high priest taken from
among men is ordained for men in the things that
appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and
sacrifices for sins : who can have compassion on
them that are ignorant and that err ; because he
himself also is compassed with infirmity.' ■ Christ
1 Heb. v, 1, 2.

178 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

is an entirely supernatural personage ; Him ' the
Father hath sanctified and sent into the world/ 1
He is the great Anointed of God ; His whole
bearing, His whole presence is that of a high
priest ; He is a priest always and everywhere.

There is, however, the essential, the untransferable
act of priesthood, that of offering a sacrifice ; and it
is with that function of Christ I am concerned now,
as in it we find the greatest assertion of the mystery
of His Personality, what I might be pardoned for
calling the juridical assertion.

By the replacement of human personality in
Christ through Divine Personality, He is a Divine
Person with a power for created life and created
virtue, which life and virtue have infinite ethical
value, as they are attributable to a Divine Person,
and as a Divine Person is responsible for them.
Christ is a Divine Person, with a distinct Personality
from that of the Father.

Christ exerted highest virtue, highest love, in
the death on the cross, and He gave glory to God
through His obedience, coupled with equality of
personal rights with the Father.

Theologians have gone deep into the juridical
question of the Atonement ; their labours, though
very arduous, make one point quite clear : Christian
atonement differs, toto coelo, from the instinct of
atonement which is practically the common inherit -
1 St. John x. 36.

GOD MEETING GOD 179

ance of mankind. It is not the physical death, the
physical blood, that is the primary thing in the
Christian atonement ; it is the great personal factor
of God treating with God. According to Christian
theology, far from there being ' a wantonness of
blood/ there is in the sacrifice of Christ a divine
nicety as to the measure of the immolation.

The Atonement is a moral claim, according to
theologians, meaning by the word moral ' juridical.'
No Christian can exclude from his theology such
thoughts on the Redemption as are based on the
juridical claims of a Divine Person.

The difference of the Christian atonement from
the human atonements — the Jewish not excluded —
is beautifully put forward in the Epistle to the
Hebrews, where the personal value as opposed to the
merely physical value is so strongly emphasised.

' For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen
and goats sin should be taken away. Wherefore
when he cometh into the world, he saith : Sacrifice
and oblation thou wouldest not, but a body thou
hast fitted to me : holocausts for sin did not please
thee. Then said I, Behold, I come : in the head of
the book it is written of me that I should do thy will,
O God. In saying before, Sacrifices and oblations
and holocausts for sin thou wouldest not, neither
are they pleasing to thee, which are offered according
to the law. Then said I : Behold, I come to do thy
will, 0 God. He taketh away the first, that he may

N 2

180 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

establish that which followeth. In the which will
we are sanctified by the oblation of the body of
Jesus Christ once.' *

There is a further consideration indispensable
in this matter of Christ's Atonement : it is the
additional sanctity acquired by Christ through
the obedience of the cross. His original sanctity
that manifested itself in His wonderful life was
not to be the price of our Redemption. There
had been no juridical transaction between Divine
Persons as to its moral purchasing power. The
Passion, on the contrary, was made the price of
our souls. The following passage of St. Thomas
is very illuminating. ' The original sanctity of
Christ's humanity does not prevent that same
human nature when it is offered up to God in the
Passion from being sanctified in a new way — that
is to say, as a victim actually offered up. It then
acquired from its original charity and from that
grace of (Hypostatic) Union that sanctifies it,
absolutely speaking, the actual sanctification of
victim/ 2

1 Heb. x, 4-10 ■ Question 22, art. 2, ad, 3 urn,

CHAPTER XXV

THE MAN OF SORROWS

The incomprehensible refinement of a Divine
Personality is not only the most enduring motive
for Christian compunction over the crucified
Saviour, it is also the explanation of the greatest
of Christ's sufferings. None of us can fail to be
deeply affected by the story of the Passion, if
our minds are busy habitually with the infinitely
sweet excellencies of the Son of God made man.
Compassion for Christ crucified will remain an
actual living thing in human souls as long as the
world lasts, chiefly because the Sufferer was an
infinitely excellent person. Compassion enduring
to the end of time is not a fruitless or groundless
wail, in such a case.

But, as I said, Christ's personal perfections
of being were also the measure of His sufferings,
both in soul and mind.

It is a general Christian conviction that Christ
in Himself suffered more than any other human

182 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

creature on earth. St. Thomas adopts this view
in his question forty-six.1

I must confess to a certain anger with inferior
spiritual literature that seems to enjoy a horror
like a feast, and which has a mania for an
accumulation of horrors, if once let loose. Such
men, for instance, would speak of ten thousand
years of purgatory with as much ease as of one
year. Once satisfied that they may use the
figures, they make it centuries or seconds with
the same generosity. It is a type of a raw
religious mind, good in itself, but hopelessly callous
to the rights of reason.

So in this matter of Christ's sufferings, one has
read books written by devout men in which the
accumulation of pain in Christ's life has been done
with a kind of mad recklessness, with utter dis-
regard of the Gospel narrative and of theological
principles. In fact, such accumulation, bad as
the taste is, defeats its own end : it takes Christ's
Passion out of the human sphere, and makes it
profitless to us as an example and as a consolation.

The thesis of St. Thomas, however, that Christ
suffered more than any other single man ever
did, is common Christian sentiment, and it is
wonderfully helpful in the struggle of life.

' From all these causes,' says St. Thomas at
the end of the article I have quoted, ' it is clear

1 Quest. 46, art. 6«

THE MAN OF SORROWS 183

that the pain of Christ was the greatest of all
pains/

It would be difficult to assign any single cause
that gives to Christ's sufferings such proportions :
there are many causes at work, coming from the
complexity of His wonderful Personality.

His physical torments would go a long way
to make of Him one of the most ill-treated human
beings, chiefly if they are taken in connection
with the ingratitudes and the treasons that brought
them about. But when all has been said, in order
to give the explanation how Christ's suffering was
simply and absolutely ' the greatest/ we have
to fall back on the perfection of His hypostatic-
ally united nature. Christ's body was a miracle
of perfection and delicacy. His soul was the
finest instrument of feeling that ever was. On
a body of such complexion, tortures like those
described so soberly in the Gospel narratives would
assume unwonted proportions, which sufferings
no special heavenly consolations seem to have
sweetened, when the pain was actually on Him.
In His mind, He voluntarily admitted sorrow
for sin, for failure in the spiritual world, and His
keen soul became its own tormentor. In this
matter of Christ's spiritual sufferings over the
sins of the world there seems to be no knowable
limits. How much did He allow Himself to be
invaded by that keen internal sorrow ? ■ Christ,'

184 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

says St. Thomas, ' in order to satisfy for the sins
of all men, took on Himself sadness, a sadness
that was the greatest human sadness, as an absolute
measure, but a sadness that did not go beyond the
rule of sound reason/ x

St. Thomas makes another golden remark in
connection with Christ's death. ' The bodily Life
of Christ was of such excellency, and this chiefly
on account of Divinity united (hypostatically),
that loss even for an hour would be a matter of
much greater sorrow than the loss of the life of
any other man for any length of time.' 2

The Passion of Christ ought to be a subject of
tender thought, even for the most exact and most
unemotional mind. There is not in it physical pain
merely for the sake of a raw contempt of physical
well-being. We know that it is voluntary in the
sense of its not having been the only possible device
God had to redeem the world, yet that there is in
it a divine adaptation of most excellent means to
a most excellent end is made manifest by the very
choice God made of it to be the cause of our
Redemption.

1 Ad 2 urn, * Ad 4 um.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE HAPPINESS OF CHRIST

It would be a most ungracious and unnatural
theology to speak of Christ's sorrows without even
mentioning Christ's joys. The contemplation of
Christ as the man of sorrow, if it were too ex-
clusive, would become a positive heresy, as such
exclusiveness would mean that Christ was the great
sufferer by a kind of wild fatality, that He was the
personification of the Weltschmerz, of the world's
unspoken agony.

With all our faith in Christ's vicarious atone-
ment ; with all the literalness of inspired language,
such as St. Paul's expression,1 ' Him that knew no
sin, for us he hath made sin ' ; with all the
bitterness of Christ's death, — the theological fact
remains, that the element of joy in Christ's
human life was immensely preponderant.

We must bear in mind that there was never in
Christ any struggling after happiness, or even after
higher happiness, out of unhappiness. He con-

1 2 Cor, v, 21,

186 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

descended to put aside, partially, happiness for a
time ; but there is never in Him the grim stretching
forward to life and light that characterises the
earthly hero. His mortality and passibility were
temporary arrangements of a miraculous nature,
and though the cessation of such an arrangement
was to be in a sense Christ's human reward, it
differed profoundly from our release from this body
of sin, inasmuch as we are released from a fatal
and universal law, whilst Christ's glorification was
the cessation of the miraculous suspension of
glorification. When Christ entered into that
personal glory that was His birthright, He entered
into it in a spirit of triumph, with * greater honour/
as St. Thomas says in article six of the forty-ninth
question. But being the heir, not a stranger, it was
merely ' a home-coming ' when He received the
totality of His happiness.

The Christ of the Gospels is as much the source
of life and joy to the millions of human souls that
worship Him as is the Christ of Heaven. He
could be no such support if His mortal existence
had been unalloyed agony.

The doctrine of St. Thomas as to the fulness and
the perseverance of Christ's bliss is most constant
and most unequivocal. Christ had beatific vision
from the first moment of His conception in Mary's
womb. His beatific vision was immensely greater
than the visions of all other created spirits put

THE HAPPINESS OF CHRIST 187

together. His soul had the exceptional favour
of being created in beatific vision, a state of
blessedness not conferred on any other created
mind.

I quote the third objection of the fourth article
of the thirty-fourth question with its answer ; it gives
us in a few words the key to the mystery of Christ's
exceptional position in the scale of happiness.
The objection is as follows : ' What belongs neither
to man, nor to the angel, seems to be the attribute
of God Himself ; and therefore it cannot belong
to Christ, as far as He is man. But always to be
happy (through beatific vision) belongs neither
to man nor to the angel ; for if they had been
created happy (through beatific vision) they would
not have sinned afterwards. Therefore Christ as
man was not happy (through beatific vision) from
the first moment of His conception.'

The answer is short : ' I answer the third
objection and say that Christ from the fact of His
being God and man had even in His manhood
something more excellent than other creatures —
namely, that He should be happy (through beatific
vision) from the very beginning/

Far from making ' happiness ' for Himself the
goal of a vehement struggle with the powers of
sadness, the Christ of our theology holds an un-
precedented position of bliss by His very birthright.

What beatific vision means as a source of

188 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

happiness is, of course, incomprehensible. Now,
though it be part of the theology of St. Thomas
that Christ put limits to certain of the secondary
effects of that overpowering bliss, it would imply
contradiction to say that He did not enjoy to the
full the blessed vision itself. He was absolutely
beatus in that portion of His mind where there
was the vision. Again it would be contradictory
to say that Christ's vision was ever interrupted.
One might as well think of an interruption of
Hypostatic Union itself. Such interruption, far
from being helpful towards man's redemption,
would have lessened its power, as it would have
lessened Christ's natural dignity and sanctity.
Another consideration that finds its place here is
this : Beatific vision can never be anything but
a source of happiness. All things seen in God
are seen in their divine relationship, and as such
they are good, and very good. Even the sight of
a sinful world, as it can be seen in God's omniscience,
could never be a sad spectacle — or, anyhow, a sad-
dening spectacle — because the blessed vision shows
that if a divine ordinance be transgressed by a
creature in one way, another ordinance redresses
the transgression. Christ could never be saddened
from what He saw in the glory of the Father.
But He had inferior orders of knowledge, and
according to these His soul was made sad.

Many other joys there were in Christ's human

THE HAPPINESS OF CHRIST 189

life besides that sun of brightness high up in His
mind, the vision of God. How could a life of
consummate virtuousness and sanctity be anything
but a long spiritual feast ?

But the greatest of merely human joys was, no
doubt, His own immaculate Mother, in whose
company almost the whole of His mortal life was
spent. It is certainly a great light in itself, in
matters of Christ's Personality, to reflect that He
who came to save sinners spent His life, a few
years excepted, with one who was pre-eminently
not a sinner. It all points to the same great theo-
logical fact, that with Christ the law of happiness
is the dominant, the prevailing law, the law that
is followed up as far as possible. The law of
suffering is submitted to as an exception, and with
a wise adaptation of means to an end, whilst the
law of happiness is applied with divine generosity.

CHAPTER XXVII

CHRIST THE STRONG ONE

The duality of natures in Christ, being so much
made of by our theology, has many interesting con-
sequences. There is in Christ duality of saintship,
duality of spiritualness ; there is in Him a created
and an increated sanctity ; and, more than all that,
there is in Him the saintship which is His own
personal acquisition. Though He be the Son of
God, sharing with God the privilege of matchless
sanctity, He created Himself a sanctity of His own.
He acquired sanctity, just as the son of an ancient
family of inexhaustible patrimony might build up
to himself a great fortune by personal initiative
and activity, though he be the heir and lord of an
ancient domain. ' And whereas indeed He was the
Son of God, He learned obedience by the things
which he suffered ; and being consummated, He
became to all that obey Him the cause of eternal
salvation/ x

Christ practised human saintship in a heroic
degree. He was full of sanctity, He was infinitely

i Heb. v, 8, 9.

CHRIST THE STRONG ONE 191

remote from sin through the very elements of His
wonderful Personality ; yet human sanctity had
for Him all the terrors high sanctity always brings
with itself. Infinitely holy from the beginning, He
had to be holy in a human way by mixing with
ordinary humanity, and His native infinitude of
purity made the struggle all the more tragical
because opposition and sin, as well as physical suffer-
ing, became to Him more unbearable by reason of His
own wonderful perfection of origin. It was divine
sanctity endowed with the power of human senti-
ment, or, if we like, it was human sentiment made
more keen through the presence of the infinite
Purity.

There is nothing so tragical, nothing so remote
from unreality and shallowness as the life of a man
of superior intelligence and high resolve bent on
doing some great work for the men that surround
him, and with the concurrence of those that are to
be ultimately benefited, but being misunderstood,
misjudged, distrusted all the time by those very
men. Of all the tragedies it is the most bitter.

Such was Christ's saint ship ; in Him we find
that bitter tragedy on an almost infinite scale. His
native sanctity is like a fire devouring His soul ;
it is His zeal for the sanctification of man. ' And
for them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be
sanctified in truth.' *

1 St. John xvii. 19,

192 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

ifsislance, human blindness, nay, even
human sin against the Holy Ghost, are to Him
the occasion of acquiring personal sanctity.
Cathohc theology therefore understood Christ
bet let when it endowed Him from the very origin
with every species of spiritual gift, because the
hnman patience of Christ is so great, precisely
because with so much native dignity of spirit
descended into the difficulties of human

is in Oar Lord's life an element of interest

is m^fJtw*^aT"y aWypnt z it is the internal struinzie

good and evil, the sifting of motives, the

of selfish
In other words, the
:: z~-iy.li. zzzlz ~.zzzz.zz~/ Sris-r :: ~z.± :~:zz i' tz.'.izz.y
excluded from Oar Lord's character. There might be
the danger, therefore, that His life should appeal to
us less as a living fact than as an abstract ideaL Yet
Christ's life ought to be our constant sobre, precisely
it was so intensely hnman and so intensely
m us nnman vniues.
We cannot of coutsetMnkfor one moment of moral
n finer lion with Our Lord's Personality,
felt any dissensions in his mind or body.
But there is in Our Lord's nature an element that
made of Hb life the greatest struggle, the greatest
tragedy. It was that contradiction between His
personal sanctity and Iris external surroundings-

CHRIST THE STRONG ONE 193

He was indeed the Son of God come down from
heaven* to live amongst short-sighted, prejudiced,
ignorant, and sinful men ; and lie came to share, so
to speak, their social position. There was the great
struggle between this incomparable superiority
and human ifriprw wi 1 yT For, the moment He ^titers
into the world, He identifies Himself with the men
that surround Him.

He is not as one living amongst men and yet
picking his steps carefully, raising his garment lest
it be soiled, and saying to all that are near, ' Do not
touch me, because I am dean.' No ; He walks
bravely with the sinner and the traitor, with the
coward and the fanatic, for they are truly His
friends. Their friendship and their good will have
become indispensable to Him, if His work is to
have roots in the human race. This intimate
contact between Him and the living man was a
necessary element in the Redemption. How could
man be sanctified unless his heart had been won by
God? Our Lord had to enter into the hves of His
followers; He had to admit them into the hidden-
ness of His own life. It is in this contact between
highest sanctity and human commonness that we
are to find that element of conflict which lends to
His life its human interest.

It is no doubt a spectacle for angels to see a
being of clay, such as man is, rise gradually to the
spiritual plane, through a series of disappointments

194 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

in the things he had set his heart upon. But what
shall we say of consummate sanctity and highest
spiritualness giving itself to man as a friend, to be
treated by him as a friend, in his own gross way of
understanding and treating sanctity and spiritual-
ness ? For we shall see how the Son of God treats
with man on the footing of equality ; how He never
uses His omnipotence to precipitate a conclusion,
to overpower a mind with the impression of His
own excellency. He is determined to let Himself
be found by man, as no doubt any other way of
convincing man would not be so deep, not so
lasting.

The great truths of sacred theology concerning
the God Incarnate are considered sometimes to be
mere abstractions, incapable of giving life and
colour to our Lord's Personality. Nothing could
be less true. They all enter into the very life of
Our Lord ; they make that life one of palpitating
interest, precisely because they give us the key to
that incomparable superiority of Our Lord's nature,
which superiority is of all things the one element
we must constantly bear in mind if we are to
understand Our Lord's life.

It is strange how an act or a word coming from
a human being of some excellency sanctifies for
ever the spot where the act was performed or the
word was pronounced. We travel a thousand miles,
and the country we go through is nothing to us.

CHRIST THE STRONG ONE 195

We come to the spot where a human mind, a human
heart have been at their best, were it only for a
moment, and there we get easily lost in thought, so
great is the impression.

Our Lord's excellency was such as to give to the
very stones over which His shadow fell the power
of melting the heart of the pure and simple.

o 2

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE GOSPEL

It is the law of all real greatness not to be under-
stood. The great are great because they are above
their surroundings, because they see farther or even
differently. In every greatness there is a practical
disregard of established ways and axioms. In our
Lord's life there is this trait of greatness.

He is misunderstood, and His own did not
understand Him. There are few things that are
more pathetic than the conversation which St.
Peter had with his Master shortly after Simon Peter
had been promised the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven. ' It is then/ says the Evangelist, ' that
Christ began to speak to them of what was going
to happen ; that He was going up to Jerusalem, there
to be reviled by the high priests and the scribes,
and to be put to death, and to rise on the third day.
Then Simon Peter took Him aside and rebuked Him,
saying, " Far be such things from thee." '

We can easily imagine St. Peter, strong in the
conviction that he had his Master's confidence, and

MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE GOSPEL 197

that therefore he could do what no one else could
do, administer to him a gentle rebuke ; he walks
away with Him, and no doubt after a very polite
introduction comes to the matter that weighs on
his mind. He has a right to look after his Master's
interests, and certainly he understands them as well
as the Master Himself. The Master listens silently,
and when Simon Peter has finished delivering
himself of his carefully prepared rebuke, Christ
turns round and looks on poor Peter with unusual
sternness. The two had been walking side by side
whilst Peter was unfolding his views. ' Take thy-
self behind me, thou Satan ; for thou art a scandal
unto me : thou savourest the things of man, not
the things of God.' Peter was far from under-
standing his Master; with all his good will and
his good intentions, and with all his loyalty to his
Master, his mind was still moving on the plane of
man. Our Lord's admonitions that follow directly
after look very much like an answer to the remarks
Peter must have made in his effort to dissuade the
Master. ' If one wants to walk after me, let him
take up his cross and follow me/ 'He that loseth
his soul shall find it ; and what does it profit a man
if he gain the whole universe and suffer the loss of
his soul ? ' ■ For what shall man give for his soul ?
For the Son of man will come in the glory of his
Father with the angels, and then he shall give to
everyone according to his deserts. Amen, I say

ig8 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

unto you, There are some standing here who will
not die without having seen the Son of man in his
glory/

This last allusion to the Transfiguration, which
was to take place a few days after, and in which
Peter was to hold such a conspicuous place, seemed
to be a kind of revulsion in our Lord's feeling
towards Peter, after the sharp rebuke. It would
seem as if our Lord's chief internal suffering had
been his being misunderstood by the men that
loved Him and whom He loved.

Besides the righteous indignation expressed in the
rebuke to St. Peter, there are other passages in the
Gospels where Christ expresses grief, if not anger,
at being so sadly misunderstood. f Incredulous
and perverse generation, how long shall I be with
you, how long shall I bear you ? ' The very men
who come to Him with their sick to be healed doubt
His power and His Mission. It might be said that
the tragedy of the Gospels lies in that constant
misunderstanding. There is a kind of ill will in
Our Lord's surroundings which our Lord compares
in one passage with the naughtiness and the sulkiness
of children playing in the market-place. ' We
played to you, and you would not sing ; we piped
to you, and you would not dance/

Certain schools of religion in our own days take
a pleasure in explaining Christ's unpopularity from
political or social motives. Christ raised His voice

MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE GOSPEL 199

against the rich and the powerful in favour of
the poor, it is said. His unpopularity was like
the unpopularity of a demagogue with the ruling
party.

Such a view is strangely superficial. Our Lord
was misunderstood by His own friends more than by
anyone else. He rebuked the poor as sternly as He
rebuked the rich. Many did not walk with Him
any more, saying, ' This is a hard speech ; who can
bear it ? ' The hard speech was anything but a
revolutionary speech : it was the announcement
of the Holy Eucharist.

There was, in fact, not a single individual, with
the exception of His mother, who had come into
contact with Christ, who at one time or another
was not a prey to doubts as to His real mission and
character. His crucifixion was a scandal even to
the most persevering friend. ' You all shall suffer
scandal in me to-night.' Christ's life's effort seems
to have been to gain the confidence of a few. Now,
why is it that our Lord had such difficulty in gaining
a following entirely devoted to Him, when it is the
achievement of every agitator to gather round him
in a few days crowds of men who believe in him
blindly, and swear by him, ready to die for him
or with him. There is not a trace of such over-
powering ascendancy over man in our Lord's life.
Doubt, suspicion, diffidence, are seen on every side.
Peter alone boasts that he is ready to follow Him

200 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

to prison and to death, and the Master meets His
boast with a sad smile. * I come in my Father's
name, and you do not believe me. Somebody else
will come in his own name, and you will believe
him.'

Leaders of all sorts with human causes or human
interests, coming in their own names, have done
indeed what Christ could not do : they have had
desperate followers. If the Gospels were the
imagination of naive men they would have repre-
sented their hero as a man of irresistible power
over his followers ; his manifold miracles would
have been given as the explanation of a devotedness
unto death on the part of the followers. Instead,
we have miracles on the one hand, and unsur-
mountable diffidences on the other hand.

The explanation is this : Christ had no human
cause to defend ; he was no partisan ; He came,
as He says, in the name of His Father, with the
fulness of truth, not with a political or social idea.
He came with all ideas, and it would seem that the
human mind has difficulties in trusting another
mind that is not one-sided, but is complete and
absolutely wise, taking in every view and every
side of things. Man follows easily isolated
impressions and ideas, as an animal follows
irresistible instincts ; but it is only highest culture
that makes man love faithfully the fulness of truth,
the truth of God in its multitudinousness of form

MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE GOSPEL 201

and presentment. John the Baptist had no
difficulty in getting a faithful following, in spite
of his austerities ; his disciples compare favourably
with Christ's disciples in their loyalty to the leader.
It was because John had a definite, an exclusive
mode of life, whilst Christ required from His disciple
every perfection of mind and heart.

Man's loyalty is always partisanship ; faith in
Christ, on the contrary, is intellectual culture and
charity of the heart. To arrive at a perfect faith
in Christ, man has to give up what it is most difficult
to part with, his partisan attachments. The Jews
by whom He was surrounded were passionate
partisans ; everyone expected a Christ that would
be the glorification and triumph of his own partisan
ideal ; Christ goes back to the fundamental universal
non-partisan principles of life and sanctity, and He
is met from every side with angry looks because He
does not take up the race with the fanatic and the
zealot. The Holy Ghost is the Kingdom of God,
not the triumph of the Jewish nationality — the
Spirit of God that knows no boundaries ; He is the
Spirit of the Greek as well as of the Jew ; He is
the only movement Christ came to establish.

All popularities are popularities of parties ; to
substitute for party universal charity and love is
the surest way to be misunderstood.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CHRIST TRAGEDY

Christ's career has all the characteristics of a
tragedy ; He was born to be the consolation of
Israel, and He proved to be the child that is set
for the fall and for the resurrection of many in
Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted.1

Israel had been living in the hopes of a child
conceived and born of the Virgin, bearing the
glorious name of Emmanuel, to be a sign of God's
omnipotent favour to His people in distress.

But, like many other long-expected scions of
ruling houses, He proved to be His people's mis-
fortune and curse : ' Let his blood be upon us, and
upon our children.' 2

History, so full of the cruellest tragedies, has no
tragedy like the tragedy of Christ. The hope for
which Israel lived became its curse through that
awful misunderstanding which the Gospel calls
blindness of heart. St. Paul has dramatised the
terrible irony of things with the genius of a Sophocles

1 St. Luke ii. 34. 2 St. Matt, xxvii. 25,

THE CHRIST TRAGEDY 203

in the Epistle to the Romans : ' I speak the truth
in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness
in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sadness, a
continual sorrow in my heart ; for I wished myself
to be an anathema from Christ for my brethren
who are my kinsmen, according to the flesh, who
are Israelites, to whom belongeth the adoption as
of children, and the glory, and the testimony, and
the giving of the law, and the service of God, and
the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom
is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all
things, God blessed for ever. . . .' * What then
shall we say ? That the Gentiles who followed not
after justice, have attained to justice, even the justice
that is of faith ? But Israel, by following after
the law of justice, is not come unto the law of
justice. Why so ? Because they sought it not by
faith, but as it were of works ; for they stumbled at
the stumbling-stone, as it is written, Behold, I lay
in Sion a stumbling-stone and a rock of scandal,
and whosoever believeth in Him shall not be con-
founded/ 2 ' Brethren, the will of my heart indeed
and my prayer to God is for them unto salvation ;
for I bear them witness that they have a zeal of
God, but not according to knowledge ; for they, not
knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish
their own, have not submitted themselves to the
justice of God/ 3

1 Rom. ix. 1-5. ' Rom. ix. 30-33. * Rom. x. 1-3.

204 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

But nothing would show more clearly the
bitterness of the tragedy than St. Luke's picture
in chapter xix. of his Gospel. ' And when Jesus
drew near, seeing the city, He wept over it, saying,
If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy
day, the things that are to thy peace, but now
they are hidden from thine eyes, for the days
shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall
cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round,
and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to
the ground, and thy children who are in thee ; and
they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, be-
cause thou hast not known the time of thy visitation/

It may be said \vith perfect theological accuracy
that what was the primary motive of Christ's
coming was a tremendous failure, a failure which
Christ tried to avert with all His might. We
are too apt to think that Christ courted failure
in order that prophecies might be fulfilled, and
that His sacrifice on the Cross might become a
possibility. No doubt it is difficult for our limited
mind to see how an event which God has chosen
to be the means of some great good does not become,
through the fact of that divine choice, a necessary
and unavoidable event, from which there is no
escape ; and if efforts at escaping it are made, they
look very much like so many sham movements.
As it was written that Christ should die to save
mankind, we find it difficult to believe that Christ's

THE CHRIST TRAGEDY 205

effort to win the Jewish nation to His love were
efforts of tremendous sincerity.

He is very persistent in reminding His disciples
of this His failure, in order to teach them not to
be discouraged at their own future Apostolic failures ;
in fact, the memory of Christ's failure ought to
keep the Christian from being ambitious even
in his zeal for the Master. ' Amen, Amen, I say
to you, the servant is not greater than his Lord,
neither is the Apostle greater than he that sent
him. If you know these things, you shall be
blessed if you do them.' l ' If the world hate you,
know you that it has hated me before you. If
you had been of the world, the world would love
its own ; but because you are not of the world,
but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore
the world hateth you. Remember my word that
I said to you, The servant is not greater than his
master. If they have persecuted me, they will also
persecute you ; if they have kept my word, they
will keep yours also. 2

' And when they shall persecute you in this
city, flee into another. Amen, I say to you, You
shall not finish all the cities of Israel till the Son
of man come. The disciple is not above the master,
nor the servant above his lord. It is enough
for the disciple that he be as his master, and the
servant as his lord. If they have called the good

1 St. John xiii. i6, 17. a St. John xv, 18-20.

206 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

man of the house Beelzebub, how much more them
of his household ? ■ x

In this utterance we have an allusion to the
saddest instance of Christ's powerlessness against
Pharisaical envy, and no doubt the failure rankled
deep in his heart. ' Then was offered to him
one possessed with a devil, blind and dumb, and
he healed him so that he spoke and saw ; and
all the multitude were amazed, and said, Is not
this the Son of David ? But the Pharisees^ hearing
it, said, This man casteth not out devils, but by
Beelzebub the prince of the devils/ To have
Himself recognised as the Son of David would
have been Christ's triumph ; to be the Son of
David meant everything to the Jewish mind.
But then there is the other extreme, the summit
of moral depravation, the lowest depth of degrada-
tion— to be an associate of Beelzebub. Confronted
by such consummate wickedness of thought, Christ
speaks of the hopelessness of saving such men.
• Therefore I say to you, Every sin and blasphemy
shall be forgiven men ; but the blasphemy of the
Spirit shall not be forgiven. And whoever shall
speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be
forgiven him ; but he that shall speak against the
Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither
in this world nor in the world to come.' 2

This attitude of the Pharisaical mind, even

1 St. Matt. x. 23-25. " St. Matt. xii. 31, 32.

THE CHRIST TRAGEDY 207

more than Christ's death, brings home to us the
horror of the Christ tragedy. Repeatedly Our
Lord makes it clear, both by word and deed, that
He had it in His power to escape physically from
the hands of His enemies, but nowhere do we find
it said by Him that it was within His power to
win His enemies to His love. He did all He could,
and He failed. ' If I had not come and spoken to
them, they would not have sinned ; but now they
have no excuse for their sin. He that hateth me
hateth my Father also. If I had not done among
them the works that no other man has done, they
would not have sinned : but now they have both
seen and hated both me and my Father. But that
the word might be fulfilled which is written in
their law, They have hated me without cause/ 1

Twice St. Mark, when describing Christ's con-
troversies with the Pharisees, hints at the feelings
of this despairing sadness that clouded Christ's
heart with regard to their spiritual state : ' And
looking round about on them with anger, being
grieved for the blindness of their hearts.' * ■ And
the Pharisees came forth, and began to question
with him, asking him a sign from heaven, tempting
him. And sighing deeply in his spirit he said,
Why doth this generation ask a sign.' 3

The sin against the Holy Ghost marked, if one

1 St. John xv. 22-25. 2 St. Mark iii. 5.

3 St. Mark viii, II, 12,

208 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

may use this expression, the limits of Christ's
spiritual power : He shrank back helpless ; He
became its victim, because the Pharisee, confirmed
for ever in that state of mental perverseness,
became the direct author of His crucifixion
and His death. After the resurrection of Lazarus,
some who had been the witnesses of the miracle
went to the Pharisees and told them of the miracles
that Jesus had done. • The chief priests therefore
and the Pharisees gathered a council, and said,
What do we ? for this man does many miracles. . . .
From that day therefore they devised to put Him
to death/ *

' Judas therefore, having received a band of
soldiers and servants from the chief priests and the
Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches
and weapons/ 2

The sin against the Holy Ghost is one of the
facts of the New Testament most deserving of
the attention of the critic and the theologian.
It is a phenomenon that stands out in its hideous
nakedness as prominently as Christ's cross itself,
with this difference however, that the cross is
surrounded with the halo of eternal hope, whilst
the sin against the Holy Ghost is everlasting repro-
bation, started here on earth. It made the cross
and got no blessings from it, but only curses ; because
blasphemy against the Son of man was turned into

1 St. John xi. 47, 53. ■ St. John xviii. 3.

THE CHRIST TRAGEDY 209

praise of the Son of man at the foot of the cross,
whilst that dark blasphemer against the Holy
Ghost, the Pharisee, and his confederates, blas-
phemed more than ever : ' And they that passed
by blasphemed him, wagging their heads and
saying, Vah, thou that destroyest the temple of God
and in three days dost rebuild it, save thy own
self. If thou be the Son of God, come down from
the cross. In like manner also the chief priests,
with the scribes and the ancients, mocking, said,
He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he
be the King of Israel, let him now come down
from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted
in God ; let him now deliver him, if he will have
him : for he said, I am the Son of God/ 1

This blasphemy is the strangest mental in-
consequence : they admit the fact that He saved
others, that He worked miracles ; they make use
of this uncontested power of His to deride His
present apparent helplessness ; the past signs of
God's presence in Christ, which they admit, are
made the occasion of this satanic gibe : ' He
trusted in God ; let him now deliver him, if he will
have him.' For such perverseness there is no hope
of return.

1 St, Matt, xxvii, 39-43.

CHAPTER XXX

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST

Character is the one element in the human in-
dividual that gives power over one's fellows.

It makes all other gifts useful ; without it, the
most brilliant mind is a mere toy in the hands of
caprice.

Character binds our various gifts into one
mighty organism, making them all into a full-grown
body, capable of every effort.

Take one of the most brilliant of human minds
that ever was, St. Paul : his intellect was of the
highest rank. But at the same time, its very
fierceness was a danger to its usefulness. But the
one element that binds all his thoughts together
is his intense earnestness and unselfishness of
character. Whatever St. Paul says belongs not
only to the permanent, but to the permanently
living literature of mankind, precisely because
you feel underneath it all a most potent character,
in whom there is not a single weakness.

So with Christ : there is in Him His human

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 211

character. We cannot love Him with a lasting
love until by meditation we have found out some-
thing of His manner and ways.

We know Christ to be the fulness of Godhead ;
we know Him to be the Wisdom of God. We know
Him to be the Judge of the living and of the dead.
We know Him to be the great wonder-worker. But
all these magnificent, nay, infinite, attributes become
a living, a fascinating power to us if once we have
understood His character.

Not to understand His character makes such
colossal gifts into a terror rather than into a
consolation.

It is the old experience of mankind, in a higher
way no doubt, yet it is the old experience.

You hear of a man who is making himself a name
through brilliant gifts, through great activities — say,
political activities. Perhaps that very brilliancy of
gifts is irritating to you, looking at the man from
a distance, looking at him as a stranger looks on
another stranger. You think him haughty, selfish,
unscrupulous, precisely because he is putting for-
ward brilliant, dazzling, unusual gifts. Now if it be
your chance or your good fortune one day to make
the man's personal acquaintance, to be admitted
amongst the circle of his friends, your prejudice goes
in most cases, because you have come to see the
man's character, you have found out how his brilliant
gifts are reinforced by solid qualities ; how he is

p 2

212 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

a patient human sufferer after all ; and the charm
of his character makes you love the man whom
unusual endowments had rendered suspect to you.
To hate certain men, the surest way is to keep far
from them. Love comes with the knowledge of
their personal character.

Now, with Christ, there is what I might almost
call the striking, the brilliant side of His Personality.
He is a being on a colossal scale to us all. He is
God ; He is the Victor over Death and Hell. He
comes in the power of His Father, with the angels
of God, at the voice of the archangel, with the sound
of the trumpet of God, to judge the living and
the dead. His mortal life is full of mighty contrasts ;
His birth is amongst the angels ; He is set for the
rise and the fall of many. His death, again, is a
tragedy on a colossal scale, with rent rocks, and
darkness all over the earth, and the dead stirring in
their graves. His resurrection is made known to the
disciples by an angel whose countenance is like unto
lightning. There would be the danger, and in fact
there is the danger of such greatness producing
nothing but wondering faith, when the proper and
perfect attitude of Christ's disciple ought to be
sweet and affectionate love, a friendship more gentle
than the friendship of man for woman.

And spiritual experience teaches that those only
rise above mere wondering faith who have taken the
trouble of making Christ's personal acquaintance,

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 213

and thus have gained an insight into what I might
almost call His private character, by studying closely
His sacred Gospels, trying :o find out the real mean-
ing, the real intentions of Christ, in every one of His
deeds and sayings. To quote one instance only.
The tears shed over the sorrow of the widow who had
lost her son, or the tears shed over the death of His
own friend Lazarus, are as important an element
in the comprehension of Christ's Personality as
the miraculous resurrection of Easter. The one
makes Him admirable, the other makes Him lovable.
Or to keep to the Resurrection itself, Christ's inter-
view with Mary Magdalene at the sepulchre, His
ineffably sweet salutation to the holy women,
when He met them, are as important as the glorious
and overpowering apparition of the angel that
announced the great victory over death. They
reveal Christ's character, and they make of the
ineffably sublime the ineffably human.

I am about to make use of a comparison which
I hope no one will think a profanation if I use it in
connection with so divine a Personality. Suppose
history told us that Wellington, half an hour after
the results of the battle of Waterloo had become a
certainty to him, had been seen caressing children
and having them on his knee, such a trait would act
like some irresistible galvanic force, like some magic
stream of life, turning the cast-iron statue of a
superior man into a living being, with sparkling eyes,

214 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

and smiling lips, and a rapturous atmosphere of
humanity about him. You could not help loving
the man. His character would have shown itself,
uniting as by an electric flash the impalpable and
intangible element of high genius, to turn them
into the living waters of perfect humanity. I must
once more crave the reader's pardon for using such
human similes ; but I am anxious to make him
understand that up and down the Gospel narrative
there are those traits, those flashes of humanity,
which reveal Our Lord's character, and which unite
all the sublimities of His wonderful Personality
into the one sweet, most loving and most lovable
Jesus of Nazareth — the Jesus of the city of flowers.
It is a study which we have to do ourselves,
which every Christian who wants to grow in the
personal love of Christ has to begin from the start.
Nothing can replace in our spiritual life the constant
perusal of the Gospel narrative with a view to
treasure up the character-traits of the Son of God.
The Gospels themselves are written in such wise
as eminently to facilitate their study for even the
simple and ignorant. They are a series of traits.
The chronological order is made almost entirely
subservient to the more important role of character
portraiture. It is a sad thing that, with the multi-
plication of excellent exegetical works on the Gospels,
our knowledge of Christ's intimate life is not growing
apace. I am the very last man to withhold the due

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 215

mede of praise from the productions of modern
scholarship in its efforts to make the text of the
Gospels clear, by submitting it to the ordinary canons
of text interpretation. Such labours have all
resulted in establishing the intrinsic antiquity,
authenticity, and majesty of the Gospels. At the
same time, it has to be admitted that the text of the
Gospels can fulfil, and does fulfil, its main mission
without the great scientific apparatus of modern
scholarship. The Evangelists give us a picture of the
Lord, such as they knew Him, and this picture every
human creature is free to behold.

It would be too long a process to give what I
consider to be character-traits of Christ, scattered
as they are all over the four Gospels. I must ask
the reader to do this himself, and certainly nothing
could be more profitable to our souls than to write
out for ourselves such a collection of sayings and
acts as would endear Christ to us.

The Holy Ghost Himself has given us the key
to Christ's personal character, in an immortally
beautiful passage in the Prophet Isaias — a passage
which has all the more importance as a character
sketch of Christ, as the Evangelist St. Matthew
quotes it amongst circumstances that show well that
in it we have the main elements of Christ's natural
disposition.

The passage is from the forty-second chapter
of the Prophet Isaias. ■ Behold my servant, I will

216 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

uphold him : my elect, my soul delights in him :
I have given my spirit upon him, he shall bring forth
judgment to the gentiles. He shall not cry, nor have
respect to person, neither shall his voice be heard
abroad. The bruised reed he shall not break, and
the smoking flax he shall not quench : he shall
bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not be
sad, nor troublesome, till he set judgment in the
earth ; and the islands shall wait for his law.' *

St. Matthew quotes it in common with a series
of Pharisaical fault-findings, and Christ's endeavour
to spare their feelings. ' At that time Jesus went
through the corn on the sabbath : and his disciples
being hungry, began to pluck the ears, and to eat.
And the Pharisees seeing them, said to him : Behold
thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do on
the sabbath day. But he said to them : Have
you not read what David did when he was hungry,
and they that were with him : How he entered into
the house of God, and did eat the loaves of proposi-
tion, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for
them that were with him, but for the priests only ?
Or have ye not read in the law, that on the sabbath
days the priests in the temple break the sabbath,
and are without blame ? But I tell you that there
is here a greater than the temple. And if you
knew what this meaneth : I will have mercy, and
not sacrifice : you would never have condemned the

1 Is. xlii. 1-4.

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 217

innocent. For the Son of man is Lord even of the
sabbath. And when he had passed from thence, he
came into their synagogue. And behold there was
a man who had a withered hand, and they asked
him, saying : Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath
days ? that they might accuse him. But he said
to them : What man shall there be among you,
that hath one sheep : and if the same fall into a
pit on the sabbath day, will he not take hold on
it and lift it up ? How much better is a man than
a sheep ? Therefore it is lawful to do a good deed
on the sabbath day. Then he saith to the man :
Stretch forth thy hand ; and he stretched it forth,
and it was restored to health even as the other.
And the Pharisees going out made a consultation
against him, how they might destroy him. But
Jesus, knowing it, retired from thence : and many
followed him, and he healed them all. And he
charged them that they should not make him known.
That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaias
the prophet, saying : Behold my servant whom I
have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul hath
been well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him,
and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles. He
shall not contend, nor cry out, neither shall any man
hear his voice in the streets. The bruised reed he
shall not break : and smoking flax he shall not
extinguish : till he send forth judgment unto victory.
And in his name the Gentile shall hope.'

2X8 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

We know what is meant when it is said of anyone
that he is regardless of his fellow man's feelings and
interests. Regardlessness is the incapacity or the
unwillingness practically to admit the fact that our
fellow creatures are creatures of flesh and blood
like ourselves, that the humblest of them, if their
heart be crushed, will groan, and that from their
skins will purl forth red, warm, human blood, if they
be pricked, just as it is with ourselves. One can be
regardless from high motives as well as from low
motives, and the motive does not change the case.
One may be a ' bully ' in the pursuit of offices and
lucre, and one may be a ' bully ' in the pursuit of an
ideal, even a spiritual ideal. Even a good man may
become so absorbed with some spiritual scheme as
to make men, as well as things, subservient to it,
making mere tools of them for the furtherance of the
scheme, with a view to some general effect, entirely
regardless of the rights, the happiness, the needs of
the individual. The Pharisee is an instance. Man
with him does not count any more ; it is the law, the
ideal, the general effect that is everything.

Now it is precisely in this that Christ differs, toto
coelo, from the spiritual bully called the Pharisee.
With Our Lord the ideal is the happiness, the salva-
tion, the well-being of the individual soul. This
divine ' regardfulness ' both for the rights and
possibilities of every human being is essentially His
character.

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 219

He does not carry His disciples along with Him,
striding on rapidly, towards a high, abstract goal.
Such may be the conduct of a human leader. Nor
does He put before them anything great to achieve,
except to love Him, to be faithful to Him, and give
faithful testimony of Him when the time comes.
He drives back energetically any mere ideal, the
ideal of a kingdom, the ideal of some great spiritual
estate. The ideal is that they love Him, that they
love each other, that they believe in His love for
them. His Personality is the ideal. He considers
that His life's work is well done, because they have
come to believe in Him and to love Him. Most
great men have failed in this point. Their schemes
have been their idols, and they have utilised the best
men merely as tools. And as a consequence no one
remained behind to love them or weep over their
death.

Christ is God indeed, Christ has all knowledge
and all power ; He has all things given into His
hands. But all these gifts He uses in order to give
eternal life to the humblest and poorest, in order
that He may be loved by the simplest, in order that
He may strengthen the weak reed, in order that He
may rekindle the poor smoking flax. ' Before the
festival day of the pasch, Jesus knowing that his
hour was come, that he should pass out of this world
to the Father : having loved his own who were in
the world, he loved them unto the end. And when

220 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

supper was done (the devil having now put into the
heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray
him), knowing that the Father had given him all
things into his hands, and that he came from God,
and goeth to God ; he riseth from supper, and layeth
aside his garments, and having taken a towel,
girded himself. After that, he putteth water into
a basin, and began to wash the feet of the disciples,
and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was
girded.' *

1 St. John xiii. 1-5.

CHAPTER XXXI

Christ's place in the world

It is an indisputable fact that Christ has become
part of the psychology of many different races. He
has entered into the depths of their mentality. No
one but a madman could deny this extraordinary
enthroning of the Christ ideal in the human mind of
races most diversified. No critic of a race's men-
tality would be forgiven if he ignored that great
element, Christ. It is more than mere religiousness ;
it is more than a doctrinal grip on theories ; it is
more than a conscience ; it is something intensely
personal ; it is essentially the conscience of One
outside the individual, yet deeply concerned with
the life of the individual ; it is of One who is a
historic personality, and has at the same time the
pliability of an ideal. No dream of even a Celtic
imagination was less limited in its potentiality than
is the Christ idea of the Christian races ; at the same
time see the wondrous individuality of that idea.
We may differ, since the days of Protestantism, as
to the practical subjective and objective means of

222 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

getting at Christ, and renewing Christ in our own
lives. But as for the view of Christ, taken as a
whole, there is little difference between Catholic
and Protestant races.

It would be as unwise as it would be unnecessary
to minimise the mental differences, say, between
an English evangelical and a French nun. In
religious temperament they are the two antipodes ;
but in the love of the Master they are one and the
same. No one could be uncharitable enough
to suspect the English evangelical of hypocrisy ;
no one would ever dream of accusing the sweet-
faced, berosaried inhabitant of a French nunnery
of insincerity. The two are worlds apart in their
religious temperament ; at the same time, their
life in Christ whenever it expresses itself does so in
identical language.

We have here another phenomenon worthy of
the thinker's attention : how Christ's person has
remained practically unimpaired in the Christian
conscience in that great upheaval of Christian
sentiment, in that great split of the Church He
founded, in that great division of minds as to the
best road of going to Him, called the Reformation.
If anything were required to show the extent of
the hold Christ has on His predilect races, this
circumstance would show it. For the breach
between the Protestant mind and the Catholic
mind is profound ; it is almost incurable. But

CHRIST'S PLACE IN THE WORLD 223

the gulf is not in what the Master is felt to be to
man, but in the practical conception of what man
ought to be to the Master. The French nun con-
ceives herself to be Christ's bride, and she sacrifices
herself even as Christ was sacrificed.

The English evangelical thinks more of Christ's
benefaction to him than of an equal return of
blood for blood.

Various races have expressed Christ variously.
We need not make this the cause of scepticism.
There is such multitudinousness and such pro-
fundity in Christ's character as to warrant the most
various expressions of His life. At one time His
theological, His divine side will appeal more to the
mind of man. The first centuries are an instance
of that. Then His crucifixion will be the most
common feature associated with Him ; the Middle
Ages lived on the height of Calvary. At other
periods His personal love is the foremost thought
with the pious. The best explanation of those
varieties is the ordinary psychological explanation :
such views of Christ suit the temper of the period.
Christ has all the elasticity of an abstract ideal ;
the created mind that conceives Him shapes Him
to the image of its own higher and purer part.
Yet, by doing so, the created mind holds more than
an empty ideal ; it holds a true substance, because
Christ is all that in Himself.

It is one of the results of spiritual education

224 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

to revere the way in which each soul loves Christ,
speaks to Christ, and speaks of Christ, whilst making
use of one's liberty to approach Him differently,
there being no impiety in not joining in specialised
views of Him, even if such views are for the time
being the attraction and the devotion of the greater
number.

Few there are who express to themselves Christ
wholly ; it may even be questioned whether anyone
can do it : I mean expressing Him not in His innate,
interior state of being — for no finite mind could do
that — but expressing Him in the fulness of His
state, such as faith teaches Him to be.

There is nothing one ought to be more careful
about than to accuse any Christian of holding an
imperfect, a defective view of Christ. For no
Christian ever limits Christ in his heart and mind.
He grasps what he can ; he depicts Him to himself
according to his need and temper of mind. He
hardly ever draws the line sharply. He feels that
He is a Man, but a Man with an endless reserve of the
Higher Life, with the inclusion of Divinity itself.
Even if the uneducated were to affirm that he does
not believe Christ to be God, I should still hesitate
in my heart to believe him, and give my brother the
benefit of the doubt. For in his ignorance, to deny
that Christ is God is not the same as to disbelieve
the Incarnation ; most likely, if it were put to him
that Christ is God without ceasing to be man, this

CHRIST'S PLACE IN THE WORLD 225

view of the Godhead, as being a kind of glorious
reserve in Christ's manhood, would exactly express
his own slumbering thoughts.

Christ could not be the living Power He is
without deeply modifying the ethical sense of
the nations that worship Him. There are certain
precepts which we all speak of as precepts of the
Gospel, because they are so strongly emphasised
in the Sacred Gospels. But precepts alone would
not be enough to create a new ethical sense of a
universal character.

Ethical sense, in a healthy and normal state,
gives peace to those that possess it and conform
to it in practice. It is part of man's innermost
nature, it belongs to the vital elements of his being.
No set of precepts, however wise, could 'create the
ethical sense.

Precepts, in order to be living things, must be
expressions of the hidden ethical sense of man ;
they do not cross his aspirations, they merely
elevate them. Now, the lessons of history are
that wherever the name of Christ is alive, there
we find profound ethical assurance and certainty,
besides ethical simplicity and directness, all of which
results in great ethical peace.

There is, in practice, very little difference between
the Utopian state of ethical perfection and Gospel
perfection. The kindliest, purest, strongest man
of Utopia is not kinder, purer, and stronger than

Q

226 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

the perfect disciple of Christ. Do we not all dream
of Christian nations as living in simplicity amongst
Nature's pure beauties, and endowed with every
manliness that comes, as it were, from close contact
with Nature ?

Has not Christianity flourished most luxuriantly
amongst the ethically healthiest races of the world,
and is not decline in a nation's ethical healthiness
also decline in a nation's Christianity ? All that
ethical healthiness is necessarily Christ's property :
it is His most precious possession here on earth ;
it is part of His Kingdom, and He has proved Him-
self to be the Living God through the fact that He
has grafted Himself so easily, and as it were so
naturally, on the purest ethical sense the world does
possess.

I do not think that there could be a movement
in the world more anti-Christian than that of
separating the ethical sense of mankind from Christ,
representing Christ as antagonistic to man's ethical
sense, and trying to make the ethical sense self-
sufficient.

Christ is the King of Peace, because in Him
man's ethical needs are satisfied. He has not
brought a law only ; He has brought more.
He has brought life.

It is very strange that the deepest laws of human
nature — which are not so much laws as elements
of life — have come to be considered as the elementary

CHRIST'S PLACE IN THE WORLD 227

precepts of Christianity. We speak of the man
who violates them in his own person as of a bad
Christian ; and, as I remarked a moment ago, in
practice there is no difference between the voice
of Nature and the voice of Christ.

In practice, and in the conscience of men, Christ
has become the voice of Nature. A man is acting
against the precepts of Christ, not only when he
does not forgive his enemy, but also when he is
intemperate or lazy. The purest love, as well as
the renouncement of all things sensual, is Christ's
life ; and nothing could be more hurtful to the cause
of Christianity than to make of renouncement
Christ's law, and of Nature's true and legitimate
joys the world's law. They are both Christ's,
making one and the same life in a variety of
functions. The mystical nuptials of the cloistered
virgin and the pure love of conjugal life are equally
Christian in character, though they may represent
a difference of spiritual perfection. A founder
of religion, not wholly divine, could not have hh^
on the secret of thus making Nature's purities part
of His own sanctity, in the conscience of men and
women. Such a founder of mere human wisdom
would have singled out one ethical point, one
ascetical practice, as the special badge for his
followers.

Not so Christ, such a Christ as has lived amongst
the nations for centuries. He has become to them

92

228 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

the fulness of every moral perfection, the ideal
of every purity ; He rebukes them in their hearts
for every kind of transgression.

Christ, and ' He crucified/ is to mankind profound
ethical peace. If there is no peace for the wicked,
there is no peace either for the man who has lost
the just balance in the practice of good. The fanatic
looks as empty of the peace of God as the profligate
himself. There is no sweet harmony in his soul,
there is no joyfulness in his eyes however good his
intentions may be. He is without peace in Himself,
and he is the enemy of his neighbour's peace.

It would be almost impossible, humanly speaking,
to have as one's ethical ideal a God crucified, without
the danger of an extreme ethical severity, without
a fanatical courting of the harrowing and the
dreadful. Yet, Christ crucified has been a greater
source of joyful peace than any other ethical ideal.
This comes from the divinely rational measure of
Christ's crucifixion.

Christ's cross is the wisdom of God ; its measure
is God's prudence, if the word ' prudence ' be applic-
able to the acts of God. There is no wanton display
of physical endurance in Christ's Passion ; there
is no inhuman contempt for physical pain ; but
there is a strong, patient bearing of so much pain
as was indispensable to achieve a spiritual result.
Every pang of that divine pain had its own object
in view, and once the object attained, the pain

CHRIST'S PLACE IN THE WORLD 229

was thrown away as a tool that burns the hand
that uses it. Christ's Passion was indeed wrapped
up in the sweetness of God's Wisdom.

Christ crucified is the source of the ever-refresh-
ing stream of human life, because His crucifixion,
taking place in the very centre, as it were, of
God's wisdom and prudence, is an eternal delight
to the minds that contemplate it. It is the most
wondrous proportion between means and end ; it
was Christ's highest moment of mortal and created
spiritual life ; and whilst his lips were parched
with the thirst of his agony, His spirit was quickened
within Himself, and thus refreshed it went forth
into the world of spirits, to announce the good
news of the redemption to those spirits that had
been incredulous in the days of Noah.

Christ suffered, as a Divine Person ought to
suffer, with patient wisdom, yielding reluctantly
to the encroachment of pain on His own natural
happiness, yet yielding bravely, because yielding
meant salvation to the souls He carried in the bosom
of His love.

CHAPTER XXXII

CHRIST AND THE WORLD'S PROGRESS

It would be the greatest theological mistake to
consider Christ's humanity merely as a vessel
of rare material in which Divinity dwells in a
state of repose, as in a consecrated tabernacle.
On the contrary, the humanity of Christ is raised
through that sublime indwelling to the highest and
farthest realisation of all the potentialities of
humanity. Christ is manhood made exceedingly
great in itself through the participation of Per-
sonal Godhead. Godhead has achieved in Christ
an elevation of humanity such as to bewilder the
heavenly intelligences. Any raising up, therefore,
of mankind is strictly within the movement and
the grace of Hypostatic Union.

To confine the raising up merely to the internal
graces, to the directly mystical part of man, would
not do justice to the great fact that God became
man. The advancement of humanity on every
possible line of progress, spiritual, mystical, intel-
lectual, and material, is the only true and adequate

CHRIST AND THE WORLD'S PROGRESS 231

view of the practical meaning of the Incarnation
for mankind. There is indeed in Christ's personal
life a preponderance of the spiritual and mystical,
a constant reminding of the one important thing
— salvation of one's soul. In Himself He demon-
strates that temporal failure is of small account,
in order to carry out the great Atonement. But
there is no condemnation of the material order
of things, there is no spiritual or mystical one-
sidedness. There is no such ascetical view of the
life of sanctity with Him as to make it unlikely
a priori that a great temporal empire might be
based on the principles of the Gospel — an empire
impregnated in practical administration with the
Spirit of Christ.

No abuse of temporal things or intellectual
progress by man can ever counterbalance the
fact that Eternal Wisdom and Eternal Power
became man, making use of temporal things, and
thinking in a human intelligence, and making
therefore through the infinite superiority of His
one Personality over the whole human crowd
His use of temporal things, and His knowledge
of created secrets, an unassailable title to the
possession of the earth. If the earth belongs by
right to the best, who has a firmer hold on it than
the One who is infinitely better than His fellows ?
It is true that intimacy with, and love for, the
mystical life in Christ frequently begets in

232 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

simple souls a kind of suspicion of all temporal
progress as being a hiding and an obscuring of
Christ's sovereignty. Such suspicions are cer-
tainly not the fulness of the spirit of Christian
wisdom. Why should civilisation be a danger
to the Christ ideal ? A Utopian age would still
fall short of the human possibilities contained
in the personal union of the Second Person of
the Trinity with human nature in Christ.

It is not at all certain that a lower state of
civilisation is more favourable to the prosperity
of Christian faith than a highly advanced civilisa-
tion. It would be very ungenerous of us to think
that the Man-God would feel ill at ease in a world
full of enlightenment and philanthropy. Some of
us seem to have a lurking fear lest the civilisa-
tion initiated by Christian ideals should outgrow
those very ideals, and that it should become greater
than the Christ who founded it. This is a very
ungracious attitude of mind, and one that nothing
in Christ's mortal life, nothing in our Christology,
justifies.

That Christ chose poverty, and failure, and
the cross is no indication that He abdicated that
sovereignty over the world that is His from the
simple fact that He is the one being in whom man-
hood is united to Godhead itself, through oneness
of personality.

In His teaching He refers to Himself as the

CHRIST AND THE WORLD'S PROGRESS 233

king of the world, to whom all power has been
given. His sayings concerning detachment from
temporal things are such as might well be taken
to heart by the director of some mighty business
in the twentieth century, without such admonitions
interfering with the man's practical usefulness.
The eight beatitudes are a possible code of spirituality
for every conceivable state of human life and
every sort of temporal enterprise that is honest
in itself. Riches, which were an insurmountable
obstacle to the acceptance of the kingdom of God,
have become the object of a special act of God's
power, in Christ, to take from them their hardening
influence. * Then Jesus said to his disciples :
Amen I say to you, that a rich man shall hardly
enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again
I say to you, It is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of heaven. And when they had
heard this the disciples wondered very much,
saying : Who then can be saved ? And Jesus
beholding said to them, With men this is im-
possible ; but with God all things are possible.' *
It is true that Christ calls some of His followers
to the imitation of His own intensely spiritual
life — a life that discards as far as possible the use
of temporal things. But Christian tradition has
always considered such calls to be a special grace,

* St Matt, xix, 23-26.

234 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

a special vocation, and nothing warrants the
assertion that it was Christ's intention that the
majority of those that receive His name are meant
to follow this more detached mode of life. Those
that do renounce all things will always be, as they
have always been, a very small minority of the
Christian people. Above all, the practice of what is
called ' Evangelical perfection ' — i.e. of that external
renunciation of temporal things — if properly under-
stood, far from being an obstacle to the progress
of human civilisation, has been one of its most
potent levers of action. It is a constant principle
of our Christology that Christ adopted a life of
comparative poverty and of exclusively spiritual
powers from His own choice. It was one of the
many courses He could have followed. He had
in Him such powers as would have made Him
the first and greatest in every line of human power
and influence. Hypostatic Union includes it all,
and much more. The choice Christ made of what
might be termed an exclusively spiritual career
ought not to make us forget how much else there
was in Him, not indeed in a state of dormancy,
but in a state of expectation, to become active
under other circumstances, when the work of His
spiritual Atonement would be accomplished.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE POWER OF CHRIST

Christ's Person is the real inwardness of the
Church. The Church, in the words of St. Paul,
is Christ's body and the fulness of Him who is
filled all in all.1

All the powers of the Church, all her rights,
all her duties are conditioned by this personality-
view of Christ. The Church has no authority
outside it, has no mission besides it. As a matter
of fact, Christ's Personality and His Church are
inseparable concepts ; they are what is called in
logic convertible concepts — one concept includes
the other. The Church is not an empire of which
Christ is the King, because an empire may be
composed of free men and slaves ; the Church is,
on the contrary, the union of souls in Christ. There
may be in the Church administrative power, at
least in the Church here on earth ; but this power,
again, is conditioned in its operations and in its
extent by the personal relations of souls with

1 Eph. i, 23.

236 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Christ. The power is given to Peter to win souls
to Christ, and keep souls in Christ, and his power
is so great precisely because the aim of it all is
so great — the restoration of all things in Christ.

If the power of the Catholic Church or, for the
matter of that, of the Papacy were to exert itself
for objects entirely outside that personal relation of
souls with Christ, the abuse of power would bring its
Nemesis very swiftly in the way of some great
religious cataclysm. The nature of ecclesiastical
power may assume a stern mood, but its sternness
can never be anything but a reflection of Christ's
own merciful severities. ' Behold, this is the third
time I am coming to you. In the mouth of two
or three witnesses shall every word stand. I have
told before, and foretell, as present, and now absent,
to them that sinned before, and to all the rest,
that if I come again I will not spare. Do you seek
a proof of Christ that speaketh in me, who towards
you is not weak, but is mighty in you ? For al-
though he was crucified through weakness, yet he
liveth by the power of God. For we also are weak
in him ; but we shall live with him by the power of
God towards you. Try your own selves if you be
in the faith ; prove ye yourselves. Know you not
your own selves, that Christ Jesus is in you, unless
perhaps you be reprobates ? But I trust that you
shall know that we are not reprobates. Now we
pray God, that you may do no evil, not that we may

THE POWER OF CHRIST 237

appear approved, but that you may do that which is
good, and that we may be as reprobates. For we
can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.
For we rejoice, that we are weak, and you are strong :
This also we pray for, your perfection. Therefore
I write these things, being absent, that, being
present, I may not deal more severely, according to
the power which the Lord hath given me unto
edification, and not unto destruction. For the rest,
brethren, rejoice, be perfect, take exhortation, be
of one mind, have peace ; and the God of peace and
of love shall be with you. Salute one another with a
holy kiss. All the saints salute you.' x

1 2 Cor. xiii. 1-13,

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE FINDING OF CHRIST

The dominion which the Almighty gave to man at
the beginning of all things over 'the fishes of the sea
and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the
whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth
upon the earth/ * is not only inexhaustible in
its resources, but also unlimited in its possible
developments. Mother Earth whilst feeding her
children is not always equally known by her children,
and perhaps the race of men that will know her
perfectly is not to come for thousands of years
yet ; but when such a race actually does come,
the earth it will tread will not be a different earth
from the one on which we move. Their dwellings
will stand on the same ground as was tenanted
by the primitive man with his savage hut. Now
this is a parable in order to convey the attitude of
the human race, or even of Christian races, towards
the God-man, towards the second Adam, the great
foundation, as St. Paul calls Him, on which we all
build up our spiritual dwelling.
1 Gen. i. 26.

THE FINDING OF CHRIST 239

Christ is to be conquered by the world as the
earth is to be conquered by man. We have to
find out His treasures, His secrets, His spirit, and
the success of that conquest has as many phases as
man's conquest of the earth. There never was any
intermittence in the earth's subjugation by man ;
but how different has been man's dominion at
various periods ! So Christ has always been
possessed by man ; but how different has been at
various times that blessed possession of Him !

To some minds it may be a scandal to find
Christ is loved and comprehended so spasmodically,
with such variability ; yet such is exactly the fate
of creation in general. Christ is God's great spiritual
creation, more wonderful than any material creation ;
why should we be surprised at the endless flow
and ebb of the human mind and the human heart
with regard to Him ? He must be contradicted
as well as loved. He must be misunderstood as
well as hailed with hosannas. He must be the
sweet food of the world as well as the world's terror.
He is the fulness of God's creation ; we go in and
go out in Him, and we find pasture in Him, according
to our taste and talent. That wonderful continuity
of His spirit and truth, the Catholic Church, does
not alter the fact that Christ is man's conquest
with a great variety of success ; for even inside
the Catholic Church the practical comprehension
of His spirit and the practical application of His

240 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

great law of love has its periods of savage primitive-
ness, and its periods of high civilisation, to speak
metaphorically. Faith in Him is like the unchanging
earth; sanctity in Him, with its accompanying
gift of wisdom and understanding, admits of endless
developments, failures, changes, and triumphs.

History speaks of different civilisations as well
as of the differences between barbarity and civili-
sation. Some of the greatest civilisations seem
to be older than all known forms of barbarity ;
nothing prevents our thinking in that way of
God's great spiritual creation — Christ. The earliest
record of man's conquest of Christ is high sanctity
— the sanctity of the primitive Church. There were
other sanctities, or rather other periods of sanctity
— sanctity being the same essentially at bottom,
yet with differences that are as great as the differ-
ences between various civilisations. Oneness of
spirituality is not monotony of spirituality, and
provided it be the same Christ, the same Faith, the
same spirit of God, even the strictest orthodoxy
will welcome any fresh manifestation of man's
conquest of Christ.

Christ is not like men — and heaven knows
how many such men there are — who are all front
with nothing behind, who are seen through at a
glance and put away with as much thought about
them as about common glass ; they are not the
men that ever will be contradicted or misunderstood.

THE FINDING OF CHRIST 241

Christ is the man behind whose human front there
is the infinite Godhead, the man who speaks not
of the present hour only but of the end of the world.
1 And he said : So is the kingdom of God as
if a man should cast seed into the earth, and
should sleep, and rise night and day, and the
seed should spring and grow up whilst he knoweth
not.'1

1 St. Mark iv. a6, 27.

CHAPTER XXXV

CHRIST THE FATHER OF THE WORLD TO COME

Christ's religion is indeed a religion of the present
world ; it has finality in this world, though it has
not its ultimate finality here. It gives happiness
here on earth, though the happiness it gives is not
ultimate happiness.

Such indeed are the advantages of Christian
spirituality that no better spirituality could be
devised for a race who would have no higher world
to look forward to, as Christian ethics combine in
giving to human life the highest sum of happiness.

The purpose of Christianity is sanctification,
which means everything holy and true and beautiful.
Its end is life everlasting, not indeed in the sense of its
having no other interests except the interests of the
invisible world, but in the sense of its sanctification
being such as to bear everlasting fruits.

If the invisible world were Christianity's first
and last finality, there might be the danger of
exaggerated other-worldliness. The end and finality
of Christianity is a sanctity which must needs take

CHRIST THE FATHER OF THE WORLD 243

into account the present world ; but eternal life
is a natural result.

It may be said indeed that a desire for heavenly
glory is part of sanctity. But it is not a part of
the effort of sanctity — for who could make an effort
to ascend to heaven ? — but it is the natural conscious-
ness that our present life sanctity finds its consumma-
tion in eternal glory. This is why we find in Christian
spirituality the double phenomenon of Christ being
present with us, filling our hearts with His love,
and of that kind of yearning for the absent friend
whom we hope to find in heaven. No more incom-
plete view of Christianity could be given than to
define it a striving after a Christ who lives in the
heavenly world. Christianity is life with Christ
here on earth, and where highest sanctity ha9
flourished, there has been the greatest actual presence
of our Lord.

The question might be asked how in practice a
religion would shape the minds and hearts of men if
that religion had no finality in this world, but had it
all in the next ? To say the least, it would reduce
everything human to the level of merely utilitarian
means ; it could not love anything here on earth for
its own sake ; it would be the dwarfing and warping
of every human generosity ; and no doubt with
logical minds the disaster would go farther still, as
the conviction would grow stronger that man has no
direct means of ascending into heaven. But such is

R 2

244 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

not Catholicism. It is an effort at human spiritu-
ality, at human sanctity, at a perfection to be acquired
here in life. Its eternal results are not indeed
indifferent to the saint ; they are of the utmost
importance to him, as his sanctification is essentially
the perfection of his own immortal, never-dying soul.
But it may be asserted quite safely that even with
the greatest saint the thought of his going to heaven
is only one of many thoughts, kept in its proper place
by the more urgent and more active thoughts of
doing the deeds of charity, of finding Christ in his
own heart, of speaking with Him, and of being
happy in His company.

The thought of heaven itself has always been
considered as one of the main considerations to
make the present life happy and perfect. It helps
sanctity ; but our efforts are not for the heavenly
mansions, our efforts are for sanctity. Over and
over again we find in Christ's religion, such as ex-
perience shows it to be, this wonderful balance of
transcending philosophical wisdom : the crucified
God teaches merciful tenderness for physical suffer-
ing ; the Word that is in the bosom of the Father is
the most perfect human being reigning in heaven
at the right hand of the Father ; His religion is the
religion of the present world's happiness. Besides
His throne in heaven He has His real presence in
the Eucharist, and the unsatisfied craving of highest
Christian sanctity is not so much of finding Him as

CHRIST THE FATHER OF THE WORLD 245

of seeing Him, because sanctity has found Him
already, but being of this world it has not seen
Him yet.

The relation between sanctity here in life and
eternal life might be considered from various points
of view. Just now I want to insist on the psycho-
logical point of view — I mean the attitude of the
Christian saint towards the blessedness of heaven.
It is certain that no saint has any experimental
knowledge of what awaits him in heaven ; his
desires for heaven, whatever they may be, are not
of the things he has tasted and wants to taste again ;
even when most intense, those desires are immensely
inferior to the excellency of the thing. To have a
desire for heaven proportionate to the excellency
of the heavenly bliss, one ought to imagine an elect
who has lived in heaven and has come out of it
again, back to mortal life — a supposition that is
evidently contradictory in its terms. The saint's
attitude therefore towards heaven is not, and never
could be, the attitude of the man who is in search of
a happiness he knows experimentally. It may be
doubted whether it is at all possible to strive for
an unknown thing ; one might wait for it, wonder-
ing all the time what it will be, but striving for it
with eagerness of mind and heart does not seem pos-
sible. This is why Christian sanctity is, essentially,
an effort to possess Christ, to taste His sweetness,
because, though He may not be fully known, He is

246 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

not unknown. It may be said that every stage of
sanctity has a realisation of Christ's Presence that
gives it there and then entire satisfaction.

But heaven and its glorious mysteries are always
beyond man's realisation. They are never to him
a possession here on earth as Christ is. Christ is a
kingdom within ourselves, heaven is a kingdom out-
side ourselves, and it is the inward kingdom that
makes Christ's soldier happy in all his battles.

I do not think high spiritual life to be at all
possible without that kingdom of God within us,
whose peace surpasseth all understanding. To put
it more clearly still, a spiritual system with no results
in this life, with no gain in this life but merely as an
effort towards and an expectation of a life after
death, would be a great psychological blunder. Our
Lord's religion is no such blunder.

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE LINK BETWEEN CHRIST'S MORTAL LIlE AND
THE EUCHARIST

Christ's real Presence in the Blessed Eucharist
and His continued sacrifice on the altars of the
Catholic Church at mass stamp His Personality
with an originality as great as is Hypostatic Union.
The Christian Eucharist, under its twofold aspect
of food and sacrifice, is an inimitable concept ; by
itself it would suffice to render Christianity unfit
for the classification of Comparative Religion.

The Christ of the Eucharist has been made the
object of a sort of specialisation in theology. Scho-
lastic treatises on the wonderful sacrament and the
not less wonderful sacrifice are as comprehensive
and as important as the treatises on the Incarnation
itself. Here I am concerned with one aspect only
of that great spiritual marvel : the relation between
Christ's mortal life and Christ's eucharistic life.
All the moral perfection, all the sanctity, all the
merit, all the atonement of which the God-man is
capable were consummated in His one mortal life.

248 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

Christ is no exception to the great law of finality,
which seems an inherent element of human life.
How, then, are we to view this prolonged existence of
Christ on earth ? How are we to view that endless
repetition of His sacrifice from sunrise to sunset, on
the altars of the Church, to the end of the world ?
The measure of our redemption was full when
Christ had shed the last drop of His blood ; how then
this repetition in millions and milliards ? It will
seem a paradox, yet it is the truest way to state
the matter. The eucharistic renewing of Christ's
death is a result of that infinite fulness of redemp-
tion that is in Christ's mortal life. Because Christ
merited infinitely, merited and atoned with a luxu-
riant superabundance, we have the real Presence, we
have the daily sacrifice of the Christian altar. For
we ought to remember that the Eucharist itself
is the result of Christ's merits, that through the
sanctity of His life and death He gained for us
the wonder of wonders : the Eucharistic Transub-
stantiation and its inherent sacrifice.

The Eucharist is the Christian's greatest privi-
lege simply because It enables Him to enter into
direct and physical communion with Christ's life
and death. And this privilege Christ merited for
His faithful, through the excess of His atoning
love. To detach the Eucharist from Christ's
mortal life would be the greatest aberration in
the things of Christ. From the very beginning

CHRIST'S MORTAL LIFE 249

of the controversies about Christ's Divine Person-
ality, the orthodox theologians challenged Nestorius
to explain the Christian Eucharist without Divine
Personality. How could we eat the flesh of one
who is not God ? Between Hypostatic Union
and Transubstantiation the relation is most in-
timate, and most likely it implies contradiction
that a human organism that has not Divine Being
should be the physical food of spirits, in the super-
natural order of things. After all, it is merely the
instrumentum conjunctum Divinitatis in its highest
manifestation.

But though we know little as to the aptitude
which Christ's humanity gained to be the Eucharist
of the Christian people through its life and death,
yet the whole genius of our theology warrants the
supposition that Christ became fit most eminently
for this role through His life and death. His
mortal career gave Him consummate fitness, in
every sense, to be the author of life to souls.

Now, as ' life ' is essentially a personal relation
with Him, the great object of all the merit orious-
ness of His sanctity was union with Himself;
He merited this, that we should be in Him, and
He in us. The Eucharist is the grandest and
truest result of His holiness, as it is the grandest
and truest union with the Person of Christ. All
sacraments derive their spiritual powers from
Christ's death. That one of them, instead of

250 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

merely containing Christ's grace, contains Christ
Himself only goes to show the efficacy of Christ's
death. In the Eucharist, the Personality, which
is the pivot of Christianity, has become not only
a centre and a source of grace, but a means of
grace.

The protestant argument against the Eucharist
in general, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in par-
ticular, based on the all-sufficiency of the sacrifice
of Calvary, would be best met by emphatic in-
sistence, not only on the all-sufficiency, but on the
infinite superabundance of it. All-sufficiency in
the protestant mind applies to the work of Christ ;
it never means to the protestant all-sufficiency of
mystical contact of souls with the great sacrifice.
We grant him the all-sufficiency he knows of;
we grant it more liberally than the protestant does ;
we grant an all-sufficiency of work so great that
it breaks its limits, and from an all-sufficiency of
work it becomes an all-sufficiency of contact of
a most real nature.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MAJESTY OF THE EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE

Presence means the existence of a being in a
given part of the material universe. When we
speak of presence, we must of necessity imply a
certain position or attitude with regard to a material
world.

If there were no matter, but only spirits, there
could be no question of either presence or absence ;
there would be question only of distinct spiritual
individualities, which would be neither near nor
distant with regard to each other, but would exist
each one by itself, having power to admit co-existing
spirits into communication with its own intellectual
life, or exclude them.

Presence and absence are essentially and
radically connected with space, and space is con-
nected with matter.

Now, though a spirit could not be said to be
present or absent, with regard to a fellow spirit,
if they remained both outside the material world,
they are present or absent from each other on

252 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

account of the material world. For one spirit may
be in one part of the material world, and another
spirit in another part of the material world, and
then there is real distance between the two.

But how and why is a spirit in the material
universe when his nature is so very immaterial ?

The answer is this. A spirit is said to be in
a certain place of the material universe, simply
and solely because he exerts certain activities,
produces certain effects, in that place, or on the
material thing of that place, or even on the spiritual
thing already connected, in a similar way, with
that place.

If the spirit stops exerting his activity in the
way mentioned, this very cessation of activity
is in itself infinite distance from the spot where
he was truly the instant before. The spirit comes
and goes, not through movement, as a bodily
thing, but through action or cessation of action
on a bodily thing.

God and the angels are present in this way.
Therefore, if a spirit can exert his activities on
various parts of the universe at the same time,
he is truly present at the same time to those various
parts of the universe.

The more perfect a spirit, the more numerous
are the points of the universe to which he can be
present at the same time.

God, who is a spirit of infinite perfection, is
accordingly present at the same time to every

THE EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE 253

point of the material universe, as every point of
the material universe wants His sustaining power.

The human soul, in its present state at least,
is the last and lowest amongst the spirits. Its
main activity is to give life to the body, therefore
it cannot be outside the individual body.

So much for the presence of spirits. It is a
noble attribute of theirs ; it is the majesty of
their spirituality. They can be really present
to the lowliest sort of matter, and yet remain
infinitely superior to it. They are not contaminated
by matter, but they invest matter with their sweet
activity.

Coming now to the presence of bodies, in the
material universe their being present anywhere
comes from their imperfection, not their perfection ;
for their presence is such that they cannot help
being present.

A body must of necessity occupy one given
point of space in the material universe, and when
the body occupies one given point of the material
universe, it cannot be outside this one point at
the same time. It is the subjection of a bodily
creature which is the slave of space, whilst a spirit
is the king over space.

It is true our glorified bodies in heaven, and
above all the glorified body of Our Lord, are given
wonderful powers of agility, so as to transport
themselves from one spot to the other of the material
world with the rapidity of thought. It is a certain

254 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

liberation from the subjection to space. Yet even
then it will be impossible for the glorified body
to be at the same time in two places.

Now the wonder of wonders in the matter of
presence, a majesty of presence almost akin to
the majesty of God's Presence, which is everywhere,
and yet remains directly above everything, is
Christ's Eucharistic Presence.

Though Our Lord's body in its glorified condition
has only one natural, spacial Presence in the universe,
viz. heaven, at the same time God, in His omnipo-
tence, has given it a supernatural, non-spacial power
of presence, which it exerts at the same time with
its natural spacial Presence. As the rule for this
supernatural, non-spacial Presence is God's omnipo-
tence, there is no limit to points of the universe at
which it may exert itself simultaneously. This is
what I call the majesty of the Eucharistic Presence.

It is no more a humiliation than the omni-
presence of God ; it is, on the contrary, a perfection
of state too high for even angelic acumen.

That God should inhabit on high, and yet dwell
in the lowest nature — this is the majesty of Divine
Presence ; it is first and greatest.

That the Son of man should have ascended
bodily where He was first, and yet should be in
every corner of the universe bodily — this is the
majesty of the Eucharistic Presence ; it is the
second greatest and most merciful Presence marvel.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

Almighty God has made man's salvation and
sanctification depend on the pouring out of the
blood of His only begotten Son. Our Lord's life, up
to the shedding of His blood, was a life of immeasur-
able sanctity, a life of an infinite moral perfection.
Yet it is not to any act of that wonderful career
our Redemption and Sanctification are due.

The humility of His birth, the hidden prayer
and obedience of His thirty years at Nazareth,
the zeal and labour and bitterness of His public
preaching did not win the salvation and redemption
of mankind. We know, of course, that all those
years of Our Lord's life were infinitely meritorious ;
but we know with less certainty in what manner
those merits of the God-man benefit the human
race ; we know, however, that it is not through
them we were bought back from the servitude of
Satan. Our price, the price of our redemption,
is essentially the precious blood of the unspotted
Lamb.

256 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

The blood of God's Son poured out like water,
the blood of God's Son drunk by man, absorbed by
the higher nature of man — this and nothing else
was to be our redemption and our sanctification.

In making the blood of His Son the price and
vehicle of every grace, God has shown wonderful
knowledge of the mysteries of human nature —
if one could use these words with regard to One
who has made human nature.

Our blood is our human individuality. We are
what we are through the communication of the
blood of our parents. Our far-reaching differences
of temperament and power come from the blood
that flows in our veins. It makes us of what nature
we are : apt for good, or prone to evil.

Neither the philosopher nor the theologian
can lay too much stress on the phenomena of
heredity — phenomena that invariably point to the
fact that it is man's blood that contains the germs
of parental depravities or perfections.

In the blood of the Son of God we have a blood
of absolute human purity — a blood that carries no
germs of evil, but is filled, through the human
laws of heredity, with every perfection because it
is blood from an Immaculate Mother.

The blood of Our Lord is precious, primarily
on account of Mary's spotlessness, through the
immunity from all concupiscence, which was our
Lady's privilege. That Our Lord's blood should

THE BLOOD OF CHRIST 257

have been endowed with absolute, human purity
we owe to Mary. Had she had the seeds of sin in
her blood, the fomes peccati, Our Lord's blood might
still have received purity from above | but it would
not have had human purity, it would not have
been precious as a human blood.

But now, thanks to Mary's spotlessness, human
blood flowed in the veins of our Lord that came
down from Adam, and had nothing in itself except
what was purest and noblest in the human race from
the beginning.

Besides this accumulation of human perfections,
the blood of Our Lord was made still more precious
through the indwelling of the Spirit of God. It
had divine heredity besides human heredity. The
Spirit of God had rilled it with the fulness of Divine
Life, when it was already precious as the product of
Mary's noble life.

In this twofold heredity we have the key to
the mystery of the Precious Blood ; we know now
why both its atoning and sanctifying power are
infinite.

St. Paul, in one of his pregnant sentences, makes
it easy for us to remember the whole theology
of the Precious Blood. ' For if the blood of goats
and oxen, and the ashes of an heifer being sprinkled,
sanctify such as are defiled : How much more
shall the blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost
offered Himself unspotted unto God, cleanse our

258 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

consciences from dead works, to serve the living
God ? ' »

The blood unspotted, filled with the Holy Ghost,
poured out through that very generosity communi-
cated to it by the Holy Ghost, purifies the con-
science, not externally, but internally by raising
it, ennobling it — in one word, by making it serve
the living God.

The blood of Our Lord is drunk by our soul
in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, is drunk
by that highest and innermost part of ourselves,
where spiritual temperament, or conscience, are to
be found ; and it gives to that part of our being,
by a new kind of heredity, its own nobility ; it
makes us have God in our blood.

When you are in contact with a Catholic people,
with Catholic multitudes (for masses are the best
guide in these things), you find a refinement of
thought, a depth of feeling in things spiritual, a
keen insight into heavenly matters, which are pain-
fully wanting in non-Catholic populations.

You ask yourself why this gulf between the
mental states of two families of people, geographi-
cally and racially perhaps, so near. There is only
one answer possible : It is in the blood — in the
blood that is drunk by the Catholic people, that
has been drunk by their fathers and their fathers'
fathers.

1 Heb, ix, 13, 14.

THE BLOOD OF CHRIST 259

The blood of our Lord, wherever it is found,
must produce great confidence in God ; confidence
in God is its primary and principal effect. Not
only does it give us confidence through the belief
that we have been bought at so great a price, but
it gives confidence by a kind of heredity, a psycho-
logical transformation in the spirit that receives it.
We become spiritually, supernaturally sanguine.
We expect everything from God, precisely because
we have in our veins that precious blood that
makes the heart of the Son of God throb with
unlimited confidence in the goodness of the Father.

S 2

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE OPTIMISM OF THE INCARNATION

The fact alone of Hypostatic Union should turn
the scales in favour of religious and theological
optimism. How could mankind be a doomed race
after the Personal Union of Divinity with one
individual member of that race ? How could our
prospects be hopeless when we consider that man
is God, and that God is man ? if, with St. Thomas,
I may be permitted to make use of these two con-
vertible propositions in order to express the privilege
conferred on humanity. The Godhead of Christ is
a fact of infinitely greater reality than all the
accumulated sinfulness of the human race. A race
in which a Divine Person could be fittingly enshrined
through a union such as is Hypostatic Union could
not be radically bad to start with. It is true there
is only one individual nature of that race that was
thus united. All the same with God as his brother,
man's future must be predominantly lightsome.
By all the laws of thought, an infinitude of goodness,
such as is the property of Christ's Personality, is

THE OPTIMISM OF THE INCARNATION 261

for the human race, which is Christ's race, a vastly
more significant fact than that immense accumu-
lation of moral deformities which are mankind's
history. If mankind has, as we know it to have,
spiritual enemies of a higher order and preternatural
perverseness, one could hardly think of a more
admirable way for them of wronging man than to
blind him to the fact of that overtowering sanctity
which is in Christ, and which can never have a
corresponding moral evil, so to speak, of equal size.

But there is more than mere presence amongst
us of a Brother who is a Personality of infinite
perfection ; He is not only a Presence that gladdens
us by its glories, but He has come to us in the
infinitude of His grace with wonderful determina-
tion to work at our salvation. He has come with
infinite resolve to take away sin, to destroy death,
to give life. ' Blotting out the handwriting of the
decree that was against us, which was contrary
to us. And he hath taken the same out of the
way, fastening it to the cross ; and despoiling the
principalities and powers, he hath exposed them
confidently in open shew, triumphing over them in
himself.' »

Who would dare to accuse St. Paul of using

hyperbolic language ? Such a deed described by

St. Paul as accomplished by the God-man changes

for ever the mutual position of moral good and

1 Col, ii. 14, 15.

262 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

moral evil. Mankind's moral good from the very
fact of the Incarnation, as I have said already, is
infinitely greater than mankind's guilt. All men
put together could never commit sin that would be
a dark spot as large in size as is that bright sun,
Christ's sanctity. But there is more than that : the
sin of man has been positively assailed by Christ ;
He has destroyed it in His own body, He has
swallowed it like a poison, and though He died
through it He found a higher life in His death.

We are all used from our childhood to expres-
sions of that kind ; all the same, we find it difficult
to live in the serene optimism of the Epistles of
St. Paul. After all, we say, souls are lost even now,
and perhaps in large numbers. How can there
be optimism with that dreadful terror ? Is not every
preacher at pains to inspire us with terror at the
number of those that go to perdition ? I have no
opinion as to the relative numbers of the saved
and the lost. Our Lord has warned us in the
Gospels against the presumption that wants to
look beyond the practical issues of spiritual life.

But if one thing is clear to me it is this : that
such losses, whatever their number may be, could
never take away one jot or tittle from that glorious
optimism which is the Christian's birthright. I
am sure of the fact that God became man and that
He put infinite energy and sincerity into the work
of man's salvation ; of this I am sure with all the

THE OPTIMISM OF THE INCARNATION 263

conviction of my Christian faith. If there are
human beings that are lost, I feel certain that
their loss is of such a description that it need not
excite in me the least compassion : for I know
that if their salvation had been possible it would
have been accomplished by the redemption of
Christ. I know that if there had been good will,
such good will would have become an instrument
of happiness in the hands of the God-man. Simple
souls many times ask the question : How is it that
the elect can be happy in heaven for all eternity, if
there be a correspondingly long period of misery
for other rational beings — the reprobate in hell ?
I know it is a difficult task to convince those good
souls of the futility of reading their present kind
feelings for every suffering beast into the spirit-
state of eternity ; one thing is certain : with that
perfection of human nature which comes from
consummate sanctity, the elect in heaven enjoy
happiness that cannot be darkened one moment
by the thought of the miseries of the reprobate.
Reprobation, whatever it may be, is simply a thing
that cannot excite compassion. If it could excite
compassion, the whole universe would be at pains to
find a remedy. It ought to be our first principle
in thinking of reprobation that it is a state which
is so absolutely the doing of the lost, without its
being anybody else's fault, as to exclude compassion
even from the heart of the Saviour.

264 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

So likewise with the sanctity of the Incarnation
and the concomitant redemption. Its efficacy is
not in the least diminished through the fact of
the loss of men even under the new dispensation,
and the possibility of souls being lost under the
very shadow of the cross does not limit the extent
of that constant truth expressed in the scriptures
that Christ destroyed sin completely. It may be
difficult for my finite mind to reconcile the two
facts ; but the fact of God's death on the cross is
an infinite fact. It is the one fact which I am
exhorted by every Christian authority to cherish
and to keep before my eyes. I shall look at the
world through that fact, and all other things must
take up their position accordingly. To say that
Christ's work of redemption is in any way a failure
is downright blasphemy. We may say indeed that
Christ failed during His mortal life to win the
hearts of His enemies, but it could never be true to
assert that the eternal loss of any human being could
be a slur on the efficacy of the Grace of the cross.

There are strange aberrations in the minds of
even good people, which no doubt come to those
minds from their being too much the slaves of
imagination and sentiment. It is just possible
that even a holy man might have his spiritual life
darkened through the thought of the loss of many,
in spite of Christ's cross, or even perhaps through
an abuse of Christ's grace. I should begin by

THE OPTIMISM OF THE INCARNATION 265

telling him not to be more perfect than the saints
in heaven, who cannot suffer simply because they
see all things in the light of eternal truth. Eternal
loss is not meant, and cannot be meant, to be
an object of compassion precisely because it is
irremediable ; if it could be terminated and its
termination could be hastened by our efforts,
compassion would indeed be well employed, at
least spiritual compassion ; for when it is a question
of mortal beings pitying spirit-beings, ordinary
tenderness of heart would be a very bad guide.
But let the holy man pour out his active mercies
over people here on earth, who have it in their power
not to go to that place of torment. Let him pity
the souls of men because they do not make use of
the graces whilst graces lie at their door. Such
were Our Lord's compassions and sadnesses.

It may seem contradictory that one should be
exhorted to have compassion on people who run
towards their ruination when they have it in their
power to run towards life eternal, and not to have
compassion on them any more when they have
actually fallen into eternal perdition. A reader
might accuse me of being like a man whose heart
is filled with distress because he sees a friend
gambling away his family estate, and who adopts
an attitude of supreme indifference towards the
poor wretch when once he is in the workhouse.
But the comparison is not fair. The human soul

s 3

266 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

that leaves this life outside the grace of Christ no
longer belongs to humanity ; it no longer belongs
even potentially to the mystical body of Christ ;
its severance from redeemed humanity is such that
Christ Himself, who is the head of the human race,
cannot own it any more.

We are all used to the beautiful expression
that Christ is the head of the Church. St. Paul's
theology is summed up in it.

St. Thomas Aquinas, however, goes one step
farther, and declares Christ to be the head of all
men. In question eight of the third part of the
Summa, he shows how Christ is indeed the head
of the Church, in virtue of an actual influxus of
spiritual vitalities on His part into the souls and
bodies of the baptised. But these considerations
are followed by an article entitled Utrum Christus
sit caput omnium hominum — ' Whether Christ be
the Head of all men.' I quote his own words ;
they are wonderfully liberal and generous. ' I
say therefore that, speaking universally and taking
in the whole duration of the world, Christ is the
Head of all men. But this has various degrees.
For He is first and mainly Head of those who are
actually united to Him through (heavenly) glory.

* In the second place, He is the Head of those
who are actually united to Him through charity.
Thirdly, of those who are united through faith to
Him. Fourthly, of those who are united to Him only

THE OPTIMISM OF THE INCARNATION 267

potentially (as a possibility), a potentiality not
realised yet, but which is to be realised one day
according to divine predestination. Fifthly, then,
is He the Head of those who are united to Him
merely potentially, according to a potentiality that
is never to be realised : such are men who live
in this world, but are not predestined to heaven.
Such men, however, when they leave this life, cease
absolutely to be members of Christ, because they
are no longer endowed with the capability of being
united to Christ.'

Reprobation is the only power that tears man
away from the sweet possibilities of the Incarnation.
The reprobate lacks the potentiality of being
Christ's ; he is of another world altogether.

Very wisely, and very generously, St. Thomas
makes that wonderful potentiality consist in two
things only : the power of Christ, and freedom of
will on the part of man. ' Which potentiality is
founded on two things : first indeed and chiefly,
in the power of Christ that is sufficient for the
salvation of the whole human race ; then, in a
secondary way, in the freedom of will.' l

1 Ad 1 urn,

CHAPTER XL

CHRIST THE HERO

The fact of an individual human nature being
united hypostatically with Divinity is a spiritual
fact of the highest importance quite on its own
merits. In other words, our spiritual life is raised
up wonderfully not only through what Christ did
and said and taught, but the fact of Christ, the
fact of Hypostatic Union, makes us live, if we are
but willing, in an entirely new world. How could
we ever take a merely natural view of mankind
if we are at all convinced that there has been a
man who is God — God in the inexhaustible infinitude
of meaning that is implied in the word ' God ' ?

The great ones of mankind have been benefactors
not only through the things they did ; but their
very greatness as such is their best benefaction,
because their intrinsic greatness raises the race and
gives it a renewed consciousness of its excellency.
Therein no doubt lies the charm of every great
biography : a great man becomes easily the friend
and the idol of many of more humble calibre to

CHRIST THE HERO 269

whom the external activities of the great man have
practically been of no profit.

So with Christ : His being God, with all the
excellencies and powers implied in the Hypostatic
Union, His being so great is in itself and by itself
mankind's best treasure. The world's teeming mil-
lions are not too big a crowd for One so elevated ;
He stands amongst them as distinctly cognisable
as if He were alone ; He is so great that the hubbub
of endless worlds could never succeed in drowning
the least whisper from His lips.

Hypostatic Union, with its infinitude of personal
worth, becomes I might almost say a mathematically
proportionate thing, if we consider that Christ is
the one Person of whom every human individual
to the end of the world might say with as much
fulness and truthfulness as every other human
creature : ' He is my ideal, He is my hero, He is
my love.'

The sensation of the pilgrim who sits by the Lake
of Galilee and says to himself with such absolute
certainty, 'On these waters Christ sailed/ is no
doubt a terrestrial embodiment of that much vaster
thought that must fill the angelic mind when it
looks at the human race. ' This is the race out
of which there came God/

No doubt there is a quickening of soul and body
in Christ's faithful through Christ's grace that
makes of that kind of hero-worship a unique thing,

270 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

a life-giving thing, a kind of hero reproduction.
Christ is our ideal indeed, but He is also our life.
Yet, as an ideal and as a mere raising up of one
human individual to an infinite altitude, Hypostatic
Union ought to colour with optimism the whole
human outlook.

To discard in practice the fact that we are
dealing with creatures who by the very laws of
their nature are the brothers of God, is the cruellest
of all lapses of memory. However mean my
neighbour may be, Christ's Personality is vast
enough to reach out to him, just as the lowest
animal may look at the sun. That some or even
many human beings have a special kind of relation-
ship with Christ, through their baptism, does not
supersede the more elementary fact that all men
are of the family of which God came.

It may even be said that Christ's activities,
of whatever kind, in the world and on the world,
are intended as means to win man to the practical
realisation that He their God is amongst them.

CONCLUSION

If the New Testament is to be taken literally, if
its grammar, like the grammar of every great book,
is the child of higher thinking, then we are happy
people indeed. Then the primary and fundamental
condition of our life is involvement in Christ's
Divine and infinite Personality, instead of its being
an action from a distance. We may not be able
to understand how we are thus contained, though
infinitude in Personality cannot mean anything
short of infinitude of comprehension, infinitude of
infolding, even to the least educated mind. St.
Paul's pleroma and ' in Christ/ if taken literally,
ought to change our views on the nature of our
spiritual life not less radically than the Copernican
theories of the world changed the world's astro-
nomical views. Instead of Christ revolving round
about us, to warm us with His grace, we move
inside Him, inside His Personality, according to
the New Testament view of spiritual life — at least
with that portion of our spiritual life that is the
very centre of spirituality. Or, pressing the com-
parison from the science of heavenly movement

272 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

still further, with a view to illustrate that mutuality
of indwelling spoken of elsewhere, the elect being
in Christ and Christ being in the elect, let us say
that as the all-pervading ether fills and infolds the
planet and keeps it in the sun's plane, so likewise
Christ through the infinitude of His Personality
dwells in those that have their supernatural being
in Him. ' And the glory which thou hast given me
I have given to them, that they may be one, as we
also are one. I in them, and thou in me, that they
may be made perfect in one ; and the world may
know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them,
as thou hast also loved me.'1 In the spiritual,
in the mystical order of things we have here
something greater, something newer than the
revised astronomies of modern times, but some-
thing too that human thought is slow to grasp.
No doubt the indwelling of the Father in the Son,
and of the Son in the Father, becomes easily the
delight of a mind prone to lofty speculation ; most
of us love to look at the immensities of heavenly
wonders ; the blue sky and the starlit firmament are
the oldest joys known to man. None of us have
any difficulties in giving literal meaning to words
that convey such mutuality of indwelling. But
we may think such words to be less obviously
literal when it is our neighbour, our companion in
Christ's faith, who is meant as being part of that

1 St, John xvii. 22-231

CONCLUSION 273

wondrous system of divine concentric circles. In
the regions of the North Pole, no doubt, it may
become difficult to realise that the earth moves in
the plane of the sun.

But discarding all metaphor now, the glories
of the Hypostatic Union are intensely human in their
aim. Hypostatic Union is not a spiritual prodigy
that appears in the heavens for its own sake : the
blade, and the ear, and the ripe fruit, happy children
and old men basking in the sunlight here on earth,
make of the immensity of the sun-ball a quite
proportionate means to an end. But here is my
metaphor again. Quite simply, then, if my mind
delights in the sublime verities of Hypostatic Union,
whilst I regard and treat my brother as though he
were not God's brother too, the great mystery is
for me a barren marvel.

There is endless food for thought in the fact that
the great mystery of God, the Incarnation, the
secret hidden in God from the beginning, should be
connected indissolubly with Simon the fisherman,
and Mary the woman with the seven devils, and the
woman who had five husbands, with a sixth one who
was not hers, and Judas who loved the Master whom
he betrayed. They are figures and types of the
humanity which will be Christ's conquest. ' Now
Jacob's well was there ; Jesus therefore, being
wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well. . . .
There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water.

274 THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

. . . Jesus answered and said to her : If thou didst
know the gift of God, and who is he that saith to
thee, Give me to drink ; thou perhaps wouldest
have asked of him, and he would have given thee
living water. . . . And immediately his disciples
came, and they wondered that he talked with the
woman. Yet no man said : What seekest thou, or
why talkest thou with her?. ... I have meat to
eat which you know not. . . . My meat is to do
the will of Him that sent me, that I may perfect His
work. . . . Behold I say to you, Lift up your eyes,
and see the countries, for they are white already
to harvest.' *

Sun of Justice, Word Incarnate, Thine is the
blade, Thine is the ear, Thine is the ripe corn in
the ear. Grant me to love Thy harvest, tor which
Thou shinest in the heavens in the glory of Thy
Hypostatic Union ; keep my feet from trampling
on the rising blade, whilst my intellect gazes at Thy
beauty in the blue firmament ; keep my hands from
plucking ruthlessly the ear that is whitening, whilst
I walk through life full of the rapturous thoughts of
Thy being God. Make me to understand that Thou
didst become Sun for the sake of the blade, that
Thou seest the possibility of a true worshipper of the
Father there where I harden my thoughts and turn
away my eyes. May my mind return thanks to Thee
for the delights of the thought that Thou art one

1 St, John iv.

CONCLUSION 275

with the Father, by generously accepting my oneness
with my brother in Thee, and let me pay for my
glorious freedom to go in and to go out in the
infinitude of Thy most sweet Personality by
cheerfully accepting Thy great Law, O Thou most
long-suffering of Friends — ' Bear ye one another's
burdens, and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ.'

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